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Fashion industry suffers

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Re: Fashion industry suffers

#21
post #4

Has anyone ever seen the luxury fashion items and where they come from? You find Chinese cramped up in small home shops, churning out the produce like bags with violation of all safety codes and they simply bribe the police in Italy. Then luxuries Italian brands stamp their logo on top of it and it's ready to be sold in big city showrooms. Heck, a lot of Italian shoe brands are buying their leather shoes from Uttar P…

> Heck, a lot of Italian shoe brands are buying their leather shoes from Uttar Pardesh, India. ... any online stores giving a straight line to those Indian shoes? They cheaper than, say, Meermin? Asking for a friend^w^w myself.

Yeah, I like my (laced) leather moccasins (with a polymer sole on the underside, and not covering my ankles), but they tend to get a bit expensive. Last time I had to pay 140 EUR/pair, compared to regular prices in the 40-80 EUR range for normal non-designer shoes (I was forced to an upscale shoe store, as the normal stores had no suitable moccasins).

Re: Fashion industry suffers

#22
post #10

Fashion is one of the greatest symbols of unnecessary luxury, next to tourism. It being "hit" is not a surprise, but also really not worrisome. Individually, it's an issue for everyone working in fashion, but if the fashion industry went away and never returned, society wouldn't suffer.

One of my favourite passages from Sapiens: Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of…

Treating travellers from afar with great curtesy has been part of most human civilizations since long before romanticism.

Why would we do that? Roughly speaking, simply because they could tell stories about far away places.

The leap from giving a meal or lending out a bed for a chance to hear about how life is abroad to actually wanting to go yourself is incredibly short.

The fact that apes or chimpanzees don't want to go travelling has nothing to do with us.

Re: Fashion industry suffers

#23
post #4

Has anyone ever seen the luxury fashion items and where they come from? You find Chinese cramped up in small home shops, churning out the produce like bags with violation of all safety codes and they simply bribe the police in Italy. Then luxuries Italian brands stamp their logo on top of it and it's ready to be sold in big city showrooms. Heck, a lot of Italian shoe brands are buying their leather shoes from Uttar P…

> Heck, a lot of Italian shoe brands are buying their leather shoes from Uttar Pardesh, India. ... any online stores giving a straight line to those Indian shoes? They cheaper than, say, Meermin? Asking for a friend^w^w myself.

Alibaba

Re: Fashion industry suffers

#24
post #19
post #4

Has anyone ever seen the luxury fashion items and where they come from? You find Chinese cramped up in small home shops, churning out the produce like bags with violation of all safety codes and they simply bribe the police in Italy. Then luxuries Italian brands stamp their logo on top of it and it's ready to be sold in big city showrooms. Heck, a lot of Italian shoe brands are buying their leather shoes from Uttar P…

maybe it's not completely clear from your comment, but those chinese workers are actually living and manufacturing the bags in italy: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-chinese-wo... which has a very strange globalization / branding backwards logic to it. - chinese production costs low / high margins on branded good originating in italy, ok, we do chinese manufacturing but inside italy....

... so they can stamp 'Made it Italy' on the bags, which obfuscates the fact that they are actually Chinese made. For fashionistas, the made in Italy stamp is very important.

Additionally... it saves on shipping completed bags from China to Europe.

Re: Fashion industry suffers

#25
Is fashion industry relevant? It's just producing garbage that's mean to be thrown out within a year, destroying the planet. That industry going under would be nothing but a positive.

Re: Fashion industry suffers

#26
post #17

Fashion is one of the greatest symbols of unnecessary luxury, next to tourism. It being "hit" is not a surprise, but also really not worrisome. Individually, it's an issue for everyone working in fashion, but if the fashion industry went away and never returned, society wouldn't suffer.

Wow, what's going on lately with hackernews. I see these extreme opinions on everything, it's like we're trying to take out the entire fun and diversity from life so that we can all live forever in our apartments, work from there, order food from there and in the end die in our home having done nothing with our lives but work.

"Tourism and fashion are luxury things" != "You must not ever do that". If you're into fashion, by all means, spend your money on fashion items.

I like luxury things like eating out at restaurants. I don't believe that I need them to exist in a meaningful way, which maybe explains why I haven't had any problems not having access to them for a while.

Constant overabundance of luxuries makes them feel normal and even necessary, but they're really not. You can live without them, and you might even appreciate them more if you do for a while.

Re: Fashion industry suffers

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tourism is not education as evident by the fact that global tourism is at an all time high, yet people are extremely ignorant. Teaching them to read again will be more fruitful than flying them around the globe if less ignorance is the goal.

I have a few counterpoints against your first sentence: 0. Tourism isn't a cure for ignorance, but it helps in widening worldview and experiencing how other people live and see. However, today it is mostly about having some time away from your residence/work. 1. Tourists are a small though non-negligible part of humanity as a whole 2. A large part of the people who have traveled as tourists have traveled to tourist s…

I don't disagree, but I believe that it's not the traveling that's widening horizons, it's the readiness of the traveler to have their horizons expanded. Imho, modern tourism isn't leading people astray, it's giving them what they want. It's a tiny subset that wants something else, maybe we need a different term for them.

Re: Fashion industry suffers

#28
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what's going on lately with hackernews. I see these extreme opinions on everything, it's like we're trying to take out the entire fun and diversity from life so that we can all live forever in our apartments, work from there, order food from there and in the end die in our home having done nothing with our lives but work.

"Tourism and fashion are luxury things" != "You must not ever do that". If you're into fashion, by all means, spend your money on fashion items. I like luxury things like eating out at restaurants. I don't believe that I need them to exist in a meaningful way, which maybe explains why I haven't had any problems not having access to them for a while. Constant overabundance of luxuries makes them feel normal and even n…

The last part of the message that I replied to literally goes "but if the fashion industry went away and never returned, society wouldn't suffer."

Coming from the other side, yes, society would suffer, same goes with tourism (which is also mentioned, next to fashion). There is a lot more to these industries than overpriced luxury items, cheap fast fashion, overcrowded popular tourist spots and carbon emissions from flying. Not everything is black and white to the extent of "this industry can die and nobody would suffer".

Re: Fashion industry suffers

#29
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tourism and fashion are luxury things" != "You must not ever do that". If you're into fashion, by all means, spend your money on fashion items. I like luxury things like eating out at restaurants. I don't believe that I need them to exist in a meaningful way, which maybe explains why I haven't had any problems not having access to them for a while. Constant overabundance of luxuries makes them feel normal and even n…

The last part of the message that I replied to literally goes "but if the fashion industry went away and never returned, society wouldn't suffer." Coming from the other side, yes, society would suffer, same goes with tourism (which is also mentioned, next to fashion). There is a lot more to these industries than overpriced luxury items, cheap fast fashion, overcrowded popular tourist spots and carbon emissions from f…

We disagree, I guess.

I don't see society suffering if the fashion industry disappears. Will it change society? Yes, slightly. Is that change bad? Probably not. Less status-symbol-fetishizing can be a good thing, if the luxury car industry or the cruise ship industry disappeared, I wouldn't shed tears either.

Re: Fashion industry suffers

#30
post #4

Has anyone ever seen the luxury fashion items and where they come from? You find Chinese cramped up in small home shops, churning out the produce like bags with violation of all safety codes and they simply bribe the police in Italy. Then luxuries Italian brands stamp their logo on top of it and it's ready to be sold in big city showrooms. Heck, a lot of Italian shoe brands are buying their leather shoes from Uttar P…

> Heck, a lot of Italian shoe brands are buying their leather shoes from Uttar Pardesh, India. ... any online stores giving a straight line to those Indian shoes? They cheaper than, say, Meermin? Asking for a friend^w^w myself.

Maybe not UP but I think YC funded a Pakistani leather goods startup called Markhor
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