As recently as the 1980s, 70% of domestic clothing was made in the U.S., including by brands like Gap and JC Penny. Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s? Is the cheap, disposable, foreign made “fast fashion” we have today better?
If you watch [this Climate Town video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CkgCYPe68Q), then absolutely not, the disposable fast fashion we have today is not better. It's cheaper, but it's not higher quality, it requires trans-continental shipping, and it absolutely gets thrown away in ridiculous amounts.
Overall, it's worse in just about every metric other than "I can get this fun shirt online at 2am for $6."
Yes, if you forced 2025 americans to live like americans did in the 1980s there would be mass riots. Quality of life has gone up signicantly in many ways.
> Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s (compared to now)?
Nope.
I had plenty of hand me downs, but the majority of stuff I owned lasted for years and years, and I beat TF out of my clothes; so getting three or four years out of a pair of jeans was an achievement. I remember being constantly upset with my parents because when I would ask to get something new, they would tell me I had to wear out the stuff I already had first.
So at the time, paying more for a pair of Levi's or Nike's were worth it because they were built to last for years, not months like they are now. I was in college during the late 90's and even then I had three pairs of shoes that lasted my entire 4 years in college.
Back then stuff was durable and was meant to last for years. The "fast fashion" and "disposable fashion" trends essentially ended monopolies that brands had because kids weren't wearing stuff for more than a few months before discarding it or having it fall apart so they can wear the latest thing.
This is an answerable question: the median American household allocates 2-3% less of its household income to clothing in 2025 than it did in the 1980s. That's about $2000, for the median household.
But now both adults need to work to afford a detached house, and the labour participation rate of middle aged men is at an all time low. So, the answer is probably no. I'm sure lots of people would pay and extra $2k for clothing if housing, food, health care, and cars were at similar ratio to wages from the 1980s.
The housing cost thing is generally a canard (houses cost more, but people live in much larger houses than they did before --- cost burden changed, but so did preferences) but that's completely besides the point of whether people in the US do or don't benefit from more efficient clothing production. The jobs supporting inefficient clothing production were not holding up the economy.
I don't think clothing manufacturing is more efficient overseas, it is just cheaper labour. And it is cutting off income stream to lower-skill/intelligence workers in the "advanced" countries. You can see that in the number of working-age men who are no longer in the working population. Not everyone can get a phd and do "advanced, high-value, cutting edge work", any more than everyone could dunk like Michael Jordan if they just trained hard enough.
Also, the financial environment that created "cheap clothes" is also the environment that suppressed middle class wages, and drove the cost of housing up ridiculously. The two are linked. Pretending they aren't is just fantasizing.
Finally, while people are financing larger new houses, the old small houses and apartments are still ripping upward in price. It isn't like people can just choose to pay 1980's prices for 1980's housing stock. They are stuck paying much inflated 2025 pricing for 1980's housing stock.
The textile industry in the US was synonymous with worker abuse and sweatshop conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire is the canonical example. Heavily dependent on immigrant labor.
Well into the 1990s, we made shirts and canned soup in Oregon, a place that had very few immigrants at the time. My wife's dad's family came here before the American revolution and he worked at a Heinz soup plant until NAFTA.
Today it's also the desire of the customers, as pushed by social media, to follow a fashion changing almost every month. You didn't buy in the 80s stuff to be obsoleted in a few months. And because most of the people cannot afford every few months a new wardrobe made of (halfway) quality items, today's taste requires fast fashion garbage. So here we are, and we can get back to sanity only when we get rid of the influencer-led economy, good luck with that.
I'm amazed how much of the internet economy has turned out to be advertising. People complain about ads when they watch TV, but they'll go out of their way to spend hours watching ads on social media. And lots of kids dream about being an influencer, basically an advertiser, for their work.
One reason why I have no interest in going to facebook anymore is that the vast majority of people's social media activity on there nowadays is advertising... something. People showing their latest purchases, vacations, experiences, etc, all basically showing something they spent money on.
> the desire of the customers, as pushed by social media, to follow a fashion changing almost every month
A lot of it is top down, pushed onto customers by the industry. It's very hard to find timeless classics these days, we are given trendy bits that change every year to speed up obsolescence so they purposely look kitschy.
The desire of costumers is to go well beyond psychotic measures in order to save the tiniest amount of money on a purchase, rather than purchase domestic or locally produced for a bit more expensive. And that applies almost worldwide, not only to Americans.
Plenty of people would buy domestic goods if they were “a bit more expensive”. I’d say 5% on a large ticket item or 15-20% on a small item would be “a bit”.
Rarely is “made in the USA” just a bit more expensive in my experience.
For the very small ticket item you might even have to pay 100% more if you want to support your local community or your nation. Which should be fine, it's just a few dollars. For big ticket item 15-20% is acceptable. But people only think about their own purse.
Frequency matters. A few dollars extra / 100% extra on some small thing you buy a handful of times per year? Sure. If it’s a small ticket item you buy every day, most people aren’t going to be able to spend an extra thousand dollars per year on every single category of thing they buy; they just don’t have that kind of money.
If it's food then it's perfectly acceptable to spend an extra thousand dollars per year to support your community or nation. And your own health.
Except for food, I don't know what anybody would spend money on which isn't utilities, rent or gas. All of which you cannot choose between domestic or imported.
>Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s?
Yes. Ask some of your older relatives who remember that time how often they got hand-me-downs or patched old clothes up and compare it to the wardrobe of an average income American today.
This is not evidence for what you are saying. Handing down stuff, including clothes doesn't equate to poverty, sometimes the opposite. Better clothes also last longer. Check out the Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness. To take this a little literally, for much of my young adulthood, I wore my dad's old snow boots, not because I was poor, but because they were too well made, even at an old age, not to use.
Choosing to buy more, cheaper, clothes is as much an example of consumerism, as anything else.
That's not impoverished; it's just not wasteful. Half my kids' clothes are from Once Upon A Child, and most of my younger one's are hand-me-downs from the older one. For that matter, I'm wearing 20 year old gym shorts right now.
The fault is firmly with the consumer. People are addicted to cheap shit and consuming like crazy.
We had cheap clothes 10 years ago, then Shein and their ilk showed up with even cheaper clothes, and people flocked to them in droves.
And you can still buy good quality clothes, $120 shirts and $150 pants of good quality are readily available. But who wouldn't want to have 10 shirts and 5 pants instead?
Where can I find good quality (by this I mean durable) shirts for $120 and pants for $150? I’ve examined clothing in that price range and it’s virtually just as bad as $20 fast fashion: synthetic fibers mixed with cotton, poor stitching, loose weave on the fabric, etc.
If you have brand names for polo shirts, jeans, and chinos that are durable and long lasting, please share them because I can’t find them. I have yet to place a test order at Bill’s Khakis, I should do that.
So far (only six months in), Normal Brand (https://thenormalbrand.com/) has been good to me. Seems better quality, nothing I have is synthetics, well stitched.
This is correct. On average I go through a pair of jeans and a pair of hiking pants a year. 30 years ago I wore my dad's jeans quite a bit as a teenager, I remember even passing a driving test in them.
Perhaps, but if clothes are cheap, income is disposable and fashion is fast, why bother?
Other than jeans, shoes, socks and underwear, I haven't worn through or grown out of anything in forever, nothing to pass on really.
That said, the textile collection and resale industry is huge; stuff gets sorted, parts go to secondhand shops and charity, part gets baled up and exported, parts get recycled, etc. Same with electronics, it ends up in low-wage countries in Africa and south-Asia where there's thousands of people processing it.
Hand-me-downs are great. My youngest has some hand-me-downs he got from his older brother who got them from my neighbor’s son. Your kids don’t need new clothes.
https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/7939/madeinamerica