it's so hard to get a basic t-shirt right as well, so many people walking around with shriveled up neck piece.
How to assess the quality of garments (2014)
11–20 of 292 posts
Re: How to assess the quality of garments (2014)
#12This is awesome. I absolutely hate the 'fast fashion' trend of retailers like H&M and Forever21. I try to find well-fitting, high quality clothes, but it's getting harder and harder. American Eagle is probably one of the better outfitters out there. I've been finding a lot of luck with online retailers from South Korea - the country has a great sense of style, even for men, and their population is generally slender b…
Could you name some?
Re: How to assess the quality of garments (2014)
#13Check any zippers it may have. Does it say YKK on it, does it move freely and is it sturdy and made of quality, tough materials? Or is it flimsy and prone to binding, can the pull tab be manipulated into some strange position?
YKK doesn't mean quite as it did. More an indicator of probably adequate than quality these days.
YKK signals from the designer to everyone who sees the garment: "I can't afford for this garment to fail because of the zipper".
That is, they are selling into a crowd that attends to reputation signals. That is, in and of itself, a good signal. Take it as one of many.
Submariney sort of story, but still useful: https://slate.com/business/2012/04/ykk-zippers-why-so-many-d...
Re: How to assess the quality of garments (2014)
#14It's interesting how synthetics were mostly lumped together and largely undifferentiated. To be fair, that post is over 5 years old and some seemingly significant advances in fabrics for consumer garments have become widely available in the meantime.
I've personally come to feel cotton is vastly over-rated as a clothing material for anything but cost-saving goals (which certainly is an important factor.) Of course there's the old adage "Cotton Kills", referring to cold weather, but it's also miserably subpar for hot conditions for some of the same reasons: as it absorbs sweat the fibers swell and reduce the fabric's breathability, leading to increased body heat retention. You may be inclined to think a wet fabric aids in cooling but that effect is short lived once evaporation can't keep up with the addition of more perspiration and air movement slows to almost none. And that's before we even get into the resulting bacterial overgrowth, AKA body odor, for which cotton is notoriously awful at mitigating.
So, anyhow, if you have the time, means, and inclination, I highly recommend looking at newer fabric alternatives like lyocell (typically found as the branded names of Tencel, Modal, or Viscose).
And you should always consider merino wool and hemp, which are most often found combined with a synthetic or two, typically for improved elasticity and shape retention, but also for increased comfort since they are both not historically known for their softness. Wool is in many ways the holy grail of fabrics (for reasons which you can find in fantastic detail online) and the relatively new variant of merino only improves on a well-earned reputation. Whereas hemp, despite reigning as the indisputable champion of strength and durability for literally thousands of years in non-clothing applications, has recently seen a resurgence thanks to various factors, notably improvements in comfort. (That said, my personal experience with hemp clothing has shown that it still leaves something to be desired in the area of real world durability, from the perspective of the several various pieces of clothing I've owned--mostly shirts, plus a couple pants--starting in the late 1990s and purchased as recently as 2019.)
Re: How to assess the quality of garments (2014)
#15In a previous life when I wore suits to work on a frequent basis, I got interested in this topic and spent way too much time learning about it. I now have a closet full of quality clothes that I wear much less frequently, but, for whatever it's worth, they'll last me the rest of my life.
There's a lot of good info in this article, but there's also a lot more beyond it. For example, it mentions (accurately) that the fineness of cotton and wool fibers is an indicator of its quality, but the fiber length is a greater indicator of quality. Unfortunately, cotton and wool products are frequently marketed according to their fiber diameters (e.g., "800 thread count bed sheets" and "Super 100s" wools for suits), but you will never see the fiber length listed. You need to either be able to feel the fabric to assess its fiber length (something that I was never really able to do well) or rely on the recommendation of someone else who can. It's like saying that a network link has 10Gb bandwidth but failing to mention its 100ms minimum latency.
Another item that they mention that is frequently misunderstood is that there are different types of fabrics, especially wools. Just because a specific type of wool such as merino is mentioned doesn't mean that it's good quality. There is both junk merino and excellent merino. Just because it came from a merino sheep doesn't mean it's great. The same goes for cashmere, alapaca, angora, mohair, camel, etc. It's like saying that it's an SSD rather than a 7200rpm HDD. The former is almost certainly better, but there are still a wide range of SSD characteristics to be evaluated.
Yet another item is that while it is true that expensive clothes are not necessarily high quality clothes, it is almost always the case that high quality clothes are expensive. Or rather, they're expensive upfront but often turn out to be more economical over the life of the garment. In either case, they will be more pleasant to wear than a lower quality alternative.
And the Last item, since I could go on indefinitely about this, is that garment quality should be assessed on three axes -- quality of materials, quality of construction, and fit. If the first is lacking, the garment's material will pill, rip, fray, or just plain wear out too fast. If the second if lacking, it will fall apart too soon. If the last is lacking, it will be uncomfortable and look bad on you. The trick is, of course, to find garments which have all three.
Re: How to assess the quality of garments (2014)
#16I hate the complete lack of transparency in garments. We need to know all the details, including the weave?
For someone that sweats a lot in hot & humid climates, why does one white cotton shirt show the sweat, and another doesn't? Why do I feel cooler with a thicker cotton shirt than a thinner one?
Re: How to assess the quality of garments (2014)
#17In a previous life when I wore suits to work on a frequent basis, I got interested in this topic and spent way too much time learning about it. I now have a closet full of quality clothes that I wear much less frequently, but, for whatever it's worth, they'll last me the rest of my life. There's a lot of good info in this article, but there's also a lot more beyond it. For example, it mentions (accurately) that the f…
Do you have any high-quality clothing stores that you recommend?
Re: How to assess the quality of garments (2014)
#18In a previous life when I wore suits to work on a frequent basis, I got interested in this topic and spent way too much time learning about it. I now have a closet full of quality clothes that I wear much less frequently, but, for whatever it's worth, they'll last me the rest of my life. There's a lot of good info in this article, but there's also a lot more beyond it. For example, it mentions (accurately) that the f…
Thank you for posting this. I’ve recently become much more interested in how to determine the quality of clothing, and your descriptions of how to think of it are very helpful!
Re: How to assess the quality of garments (2014)
#19My girlfriend works in this industry, and I'm grateful for this article teaching me how complicated her work is!
When she first told me she works with Gerber files on a daily basis, I couldn't believe it. I thought those were just for designing PCBs! In fact, I still think that if she could transfer her skills, she could probably get a visa more easily. It's fun to walk around the sewing shops too, which have lots of little blue drawers, quite similar to the electronics stores that I enjoy.
I had a fashion idea once: a tailored shirt with a red hem, so that the white buttons would be reminiscent of the windows in the cheatline on old aeroplanes. It seems the whole industry is built on branding and marketing though, so the technical side is practically a commodity.
Nevertheless, I'm still pleased to see sewing machines in the hackerspace. I often need to fix my trousers - it's great that they have lots of pockets and the thin fabric dries quickly, but they keep ripping in an embarrassing place between my legs when cycling.
Re: How to assess the quality of garments (2014)
#20It's interesting how synthetics were mostly lumped together and largely undifferentiated. To be fair, that post is over 5 years old and some seemingly significant advances in fabrics for consumer garments have become widely available in the meantime. I've personally come to feel cotton is vastly over-rated as a clothing material for anything but cost-saving goals (which certainly is an important factor.) Of course th…
For summer, don’t forget linen, which is amazing at evaporative cooling. Linen blends can be decent too if you’re concerned about wrinkles and hate ironing.