Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round • Hacker News Board

Re: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round

#11

Post by qris » Fri, Mar 19, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

This is enormously informative (and also long) article.

It reminds me about shorter one https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-... containing following calculation:

So, 7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 for spinning, or 579 hours total to make one shirt. At minimum wage - $7.25 an hour - that shirt would cost $4,197.25.

And that's just a standard shirt.

And that's not counting the work that goes into raising sheep or growing cotton and then making the fiber fit for weaving.

Re: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round

#12

Post by TheCoelacanth » Fri, Mar 19, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #5

This doesn't explain how clothing was made in earliest times. How did people wear anything at all, besides animal skins? Lots of Native American tribes didn't seem to wear much. And uncontacted tribes today, either.

> Lots of Native American tribes didn't seem to wear much

That's more Hollywood than history. Look at real photographs and many of them will be covered up completely except for the hands and head.

Re: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round

#13

Post by sdwr » Fri, Mar 19, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

It absolutely boggles my mind that a shirt could take 500 hours to make. As the article says, that makes clothing a family a full-time job. Although most of that time was spinning, which wasn't too strenuous or mentally taxing, and allowed for socializing. Starting to sound like a modern office job :]

Since the time being written about, we've had massive technological improvements. Have they actually made the experience of life better?

Re: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round

#14

Post by TheCoelacanth » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 11:26 PM UTC

sdwr wrote: post #13

It absolutely boggles my mind that a shirt could take 500 hours to make. As the article says, that makes clothing a family a full-time job. Although most of that time was spinning, which wasn't too strenuous or mentally taxing, and allowed for socializing. Starting to sound like a modern office job :] Since the time being written about, we've had massive technological improvements. Have they actually made the experie…

Read "Bread, How Did They Make It?"[1] from the same blog and modern life sounds a hell of a lot better. Medieval peasants lived a very precarious existence. A bad harvest would be enough to push them over the brink into starvation.

I'll take the office job where there's a bigger danger of eating too much than too little and where the only way that I would notice a bad harvest is if I read an article in the financial news about how coffee prices are up 8%.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...