Never Don't Give Up.

Like okay. People own more pieces of clothing nowadays and they wear them a lesser number of times before throwing them out. BUT.

Why do we pretend like this is pure vanity or careless wastefulness, rather than forced by the qualities of the clothes themselves?

The other day, I was going through boxes of old clothes in the basement in search of fabric to practice sewing on. The difference in quality of the fabrics themselves is shocking! The worn-out old jeans from twenty years ago are MUCH thicker and tougher than anything more recent. My old baby clothes are made as sturdy as my work clothes from today.

In the past couple years, I have had entire seams rip out of clothes on the first wash. That's not normal!

Polyester blend shirts that feel cozy and soft when they are new, become scratchy and rough after 20 washes or so. I am trying to avoid polyester, but it gets harder and harder; the other day i couldn't find a single pack of crew socks that was 100% cotton. SOCKS!

Also, pilling is out of control. The newest pants I bought developed pills within a single day of walking around campus with a backpack.

So the length of time something "lasts" is dependent on how many clothes you have. If you have 20 shirts, you're wearing each one 5% of the time; if you have 4 shirts, you're wearing each one 25% of the time, assuming you wear them all equally.

So if one of your 20 shirts takes 3 years to wear out, if you downsized your wardrobe to 4 shirts, you would need to divide 3 years by 5 to estimate how long those shirts are going to last.