Cheap Clothes Are Just As Good As Expensive Ones

So here’s a turn up for the books. We’re told, endlessly, that cheap clothes are just the Very Devil. We’re all, in effect, too rich and can have such fripperies as clean knickers every day. Why, our forefathers had one pair of woollens for the week, why should we even desire a change each day of cotton? No, really, there are people thinking like this, The Guardian for one:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] The poor are getting richer, to where the poor might have more than just the one change of clothes for their Sunday Best. Consider how appalling that is for the already privileged. If and when the poor gain the same access to goods as their betters then what marker is there to distinguish those betters? The horrors of a mere shopgirl being able to dress up for an evening with her beau, eh? But more than this there’s that use of “indulge”. This is the very point of our having an economy at all. That the average blokess gets to have more of what pleases her more. In formal terms utility maximisation but that’s what it means – you get more of what you desire, you’re richer, the point of an economy is to make the average peeps richer. This process, the poor getting richer, is met by The Guardian with a sneer about “indulgence”? When do we plough the site with salt and sell the journalists into slavery? How about we start planning that already? [/perfectpullquote]

Today we’re offered this interesting news:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Cheap clothes last as long as designer items, with many reasonably-priced garments offering better quality than pricier ones, a new study has found. Textile scientists at The University of Leeds carried out rigorous durability tests on outfits from all price ranges, from items costing a few pounds through to high designer labels. The results showed T-shirts and jeans from cheaper shops performed as well – and often better – than similar samples from expensive stores. [/perfectpullquote]

This shouldn’t surprise all that much, many of these clothes are made in the same factories, from the same cloth, by the same people. The addition to them is the brand. And there’s a useful if cynical definition of a brand these days. They charge us a lot of money to pay for the advertising which will persuade us to pay a lot of money. The basic item being not much different.

The end result seeming to be that these cheap clothes are just as good – often enough – as the expensive, all that’s happening is that fewer upper middle class westerners get their cocaine paid for in the ad industry out of our clothing our nakedness. And what’s wrong with that as an industry structure?