The reasons clothing sucks now

In today’s The Big Story podcast, many of us have a favourite garment — a sweater we’ve been wearing for the last ten years,  or a pair of sweatpants we throw on every night before cozying up in front of some Netflix. Then there’s all those other clothes, the shirts you buy on sale that are lucky to survive 10 wash cycles, or the sweaters that pill up almost instantly.  

Increasingly, it feels like more and more clothes belong to that second category. And it’s not just so-called ‘fast fashion’ anymore, as the push to produce more for less drags down the quality of even the most reputable brands.

Monika Warzecha is the digital editor at The Walrus, where she wrote about fast fashion. “We’ve seen different grades and different blends of polyester or other synthetics, and that can make them a bit more prone to breakage when you sort of like snag a shirt on something, fibres might break and it’s a bit harder to repair. ,” said Warzecha. 

So why has it become so difficult to find a decent pair of pants that’ll last more than a few months? And how do we fight back against a culture that increasingly sees clothing as disposable?

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