Today, it is no longer cheaper to make your own clothes than to buy them. A task that once fell within the province of the ordinary household is now an esoteric hobby, requiring skills out of reach to most ordinary Americans. It can even be cost prohibitive, since to buy the cloth to make a shirt will often cost more than the price of a new shirt. A curious reversal.
Ralph Tharpe, the former design engineer at Cone Mills in North Carolina, and the man responsible for making denim for Levi’s 501s during the 1970s, put the question to me this way: “Why is it that from 1960 to today the price of a Ford truck has increased ten times over and the price of a pair of dungarees has stayed the same?” This question becomes even more puzzling when one considers that many mass-manufacturing processes have been automated since the 1960s but sewing is not one of them. The process one follows to sew a garment has not changed materially since the advent of the sewing machine. Fabric is a fussy and unpredictable material, unlike sheet metal, that still requires the subtle manipulation of tension that can only be done by a real human hand.
How then, did this happen?