- Joined
- Apr 10, 2011
- Messages
- 27,320
- Reaction score
- 69,987
10 years ago we had Steve Jobs, Bob Hope, and Johnny Cash. Now we have no Jobs, no Hope, and no Cash. ?
STYLE. COMMUNITY. GREAT CLOTHING.
Bored of counting likes on social networks? At Styleforum, you’ll find rousing discussions that go beyond strings of emojis.
Click Here to join Styleforum's thousands of style enthusiasts today!
Styleforum is supported in part by commission earning affiliate links sitewide. Please support us by using them. You may learn more here.
I think one of the reason men and women (insert any people-kind gender here) don't do enough physical activity could be related to job automation, the work landscape in general but there is more awareness about the matter than 20 years ago.
I remember having to keep copies of patient's documents: I had to print the copy, grab the document, label it, store it and send it to Iron Mountain. Now I just click a button
Fifty years ago I lived in Ecuador. Unless imported, all apparel and shoes were hand made, eg.yes,
many of the italian shoemaker too poor to buy machines so they make them by hand.
They keep the cordwainer skills.
me could be wrong,
maybe me forget,
My shoemaker say In 1950's the poor people in italy bought hand made shoes.
The rich people bought machine made shoes when they first come (they expensive at first) out because it was different and exciting.
Machines were new to italian shoemaking and many man want clean looking neat stitched shoes.
he say the thread no good now.
I love the joke, but an editor may suggest changing to 20 years ago...10 years ago we had Steve Jobs, Bob Hope, and Johnny Cash. Now we have no Jobs, no Hope, and no Cash. ?
Yeah the changes in world culture/lifestyles/society have had an effect on the traditional notions of what is a craftsperson, in the olden days you just did it to the best of your ability so you weren’t fired and hopefully progressed. Today you need to have an aesthetic appreciation, extreme manual skill, enough desire to put the hard work into becoming the best, just lazy enough to have no real ambition beyond that, preferably born into money and have limited social skills and these people don’t just grow on trees, not without serious drink problems at least
This reminds me also of people who look at air travel in the 1960s and swoon about how much nicer it looked. Well a) it was probably less safe and b) you can still fly first class and experience that kind of thing. Don’t want to pay for first class? Well in the 1960s you probably didn’t have a choice to fly economy, you either were in the jet set or daydreaming about one day having the experience to fly.In most cases, if you look, you can probably find CM-type clothing items of similar or perhaps better quality than have been available over the past 100 years or so, but you will likely have to pay a good bit for them or have them made bespoke. The overall "decline in quality" is probably less related to poorer raw materials in many cases and more related to cost-cutting by offshoring production and cutting corners, the trend toward "fast fashion" and clothing intended to be in style for a few months and then be discarded, etc.
Some of the decline in quality is a result of people trying to improve their margins, but some of it is certainly a consequence of this:
View attachment 1604422
As the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar has decreased since its peak in 1913, fewer and fewer people are able to comfortably purchase well-made items at the prices they command. Having virtually everything made for us in East Asia by people who are barely paid at all, using very low quality materials and cutting all possible corners, is what allows more or less everyone in the US to have access to all sorts of things via Walmart or wherever that they could never hope to afford if made in the US. Manufacturers know that the vast majority of people just want something that's OK for as cheap as possible, so they make stuff that's just passable and keep the price down.
Among SF members, it is well-known that you generally aren't going to find good quality shoes or a good quality suit/sport coat below certain price points that seem outrageous to the average consumer. A secretary at a former workplace of mine asked for my advice about where she and her son should look for his first suit, as he had just graduated and become an engineer. At the time, I suggested a pretty basic navy suit in the $400-something range from SuitSupply, and she was aghast. I was told that the suggestion was ridiculous when there are suits at JCPenney for $100 (not sure why my advice was solicited then). If the dollar had the same purchasing power now as it did in 1913, roughly 25x more, that $100 might have gotten her son a suit we'd pay $2500 for under present circumstances. Throughout the 1930s-60s, more people (at least in the US) are likely to have had the purchasing power necessary to justify the widespread production of quality garments. Once that was no longer the case, the rational economic decision if you wanted to keep selling things to Americans was to figure out how to produce them much more inexpensively.
Similarly, you might sometimes see an old restaurant ad or menu and think, "Wow, I could get a steak dinner with two sides for only $3 in 1955." But that ignores that $3 then is approximately $30 now, and a huge portion of the population thinks that $30 for one person's dinner is crazy when entrees at somewhere like Applebee's or Olive Garden might be $8-10. Less purchasing power now, and changed attitudes as a result.
British officers were required to buy their own uniforms and still are in some Army regiments. Not sure about the RAF NCO jacket. Maybe that tailor had a contract to produce uniforms? Maybe the Sergeant could afford his own?My wife's grandfather (sadly deceased) was an NCO in the RAF during the WW2. A couple of years ago they were cleaning their old family home and found his old service blue RAF uniform. It was very well made from a heavy wool and when I checked the inner pocket I found a label of a tailor that used to operate on Bond Street. So to confirm, it looks they really were made by bespoke tailors (at least some of them) That is why all the pilots look so well put together on old WW2 photos.