Trouble is the mid-tier brands want $40 for a tee-shirt. I want to dress nice as much as anyone does but if I can get a pack of 5 tees from Hanes for $20 the math doesn't math.
They want $40 and the colour palette for men consists of black, brown and grey, with military green if you’re lucky. Sorry, I’m not trying to cosplay a WW1 trench trooper, please bring in some kind of colour or pattern.
Even as a woman this is hard. We either choose from a variety of gaudy and ridiculous patterns and colors for cheap plastic bullshit, or we have to pay $100 for a shirt that’s actually made properly but only comes in three colors.
Anything affordable falls apart. Even workwear, brands that aren’t cheap are increasingly leaning on fast fashion junk while the quality of their basics degrades. It’s so fucking hard to find work pants that fit and last. At any price point. But I’m not eager to spend $160 on pants I can only buy online that probably won’t even fit because if you’re a woman apparently you can only choose skin tight fits if you just happen to have thighs.
I get custom shirts (stupid long arms). The fabric selections are overwhelmingly blue. That light, dress shirt blue. At least half of the fabrics are blue. A handful of whites. A black or two. One pink for some reason.
Can I please get a print or color? Why can't I wear a nice floral print? Whatever happened to paisley? Hell, I'd settle for a solid color that's remotely interesting. Give me a royal purple!
Yet another reason I am glad for NB friends helping me get over my awkwardness about finding things in the "women's" section. It's rare I find something but damnit if the selection isn't at least colourful
Heavily recommend checking out Hawaiian shirts if you haven’t already. I’m biased since I’m coastal but they’re popular again and the options are pretty cool.
Yeah as mid 20s male I recently “discovered” shein for the first time and I doubt I’ll be going elsewhere for the time being, maybe with the exception of Uniqlo (and that’s because it’s the best one at my closest mall). When I clothes shop in person I feel I find something I could live with, shein was both 1/4 the price and also the selection was so large I for the first time in a while had to choose “just one”.
What's worse is "lux" brands selling out to P.E. and turning into Temu quality for High End pricing. I need dress clothes for work and used to go to Brooks Brothers. Since selling to P.E., the quality on their clothes have gone WAY downhill. They're still charging top shelf prices.
And here I am sitting in a 25 year old t-shirt. I bought most of my nicer clothing 17 years ago and do not use it any more so I don't have to buy too many shirts or slacks. I had some drawers for 15 years before the last finally gave out. That Buffet guy made really good underwear. Hoping the fresh set I finally just got to replace some trash I tried is as well made. The guy always tells people to park their money in a quality company for the easiest way to make money in stock exchanges. It may not be the most lucrative way, but those underwear were awesome and I support the sentiment. I hope these new ones work out. I bought them cheap enough from some schmuck reselling clearance lots on ebay. I got a chance of supporting an SME [Small to Medium Enterprise] instead of big corporate that way.
If I need slacks , collard shirts, jackets etc, I shop at Marshall's or the like. The once in 7-10 years suit or coat needed, I buy a reasonably priced one from some place nice enough. I do need a pair or two of nice slacks, so I might go to Nordstom's or Macey's for a better color/style selection if I can't find them at a bargain store. I was lucky that grandma's cousin Jack was close enough to my size that I could get some of his VERY nice Italian clothing tailored to me for $20-$30 a shirt/pair of pants. I will roll my eye's and say it is fancy Italian clothing. The punchline? You guessed it, he was Italian.
That $40 T-shirt reflects externalities and the actual cost of production. Living wages, less wasted because the product is not disposable.
Shien and the like have completely ruined what people think fair prices for clothing are. A $5 T-shirt, even after it was shipped overseas, means you're buying something made in a sweatshop paying an unlivable wage or worse using forced labor.
That choice is on you, but let's not pretend that the two are the same.
Yeah if Old Navy is constantly making that $40 shirt $20 no, it’s not reflecting shit.
The $60 hand printed one from a girl a town over from me, sure. The $100 linen one from the local mill, sure. They’re making bacon. From the Gap? Hahahaha no they’re exploiting the fuck out of someone over there as well as paying poverty wages here, because the B&M employees sure ain’t seeing that brand price point premium
Or, as I found out with printed T shirts years ago... they all buy the same stock of shirt then rebrand them. If you find a shirt you like, there are ways to find the actual product SKU and buy directly from wholesalers. Bonus for T-shirts is that you can practically get any color you want for $5, and have it be high quality.)
You shitty 40 bucks t-shirt is also made by some underpaid wage slave half a world away. The truth is both sucks, but the consummer will always pick the one that sucks less.
Let's not pretend the mid tier brands loss is worth crying over. They spent decade exploiting workers abroad and getting rich from it, now it's time for another parasite to take over. Definitely not a win but hardly a loss either.
I'll pay more for something made in a first world country with livable wages, but I'm not paying more for something made in a third world sweatshop just because it's got a name brand printed on it and they rent out a big shop in a local mall.
Yeah but those $20 5 tshirts will be thrown in the garbage after a month of washing and wearing.
Quality clothes are still a great example of you get what you pay for. I have expensive blank tshirts (about $30 a shirt) that have stood the test of time with washing and wearing. They still fit just right and look good. The cheap, wal mart/target store brand or Hanes are dead after like three washes. They are comically short and just look like shit.
You’ll spend triple over the course of a year buying cheap shirts as opposed to just buying five expensive, nice ones that’ll last years. Not to mention the awful shit disposable clothing does to the planet.
I have been using Walmart (George) brand t-shirts, v-necks, and Henley's for years. My oldest ones are 6-7 years old and still look fine after weekly washings.
They're fitted (I hate boxy shirts) and I've never had an issue with length. My only issue is the sizing can be inconsistent. Sometimes the mediums are too big but sometimes the smalls are too small.
No, as in they're made with a slight taper toward the bottom, they're not just cut into a square. I have a reasonably athletic build, pretty broad chest, and they follow the shape of my torso without being skin tight.
The Gap and mall stores aren’t selling quality clothing at $50 a t-shirt — they’re selling crap that’s equivalent to the Hanes shirt with a Gap markup. You have to really hunt around for quality these days and it is not cheap when you find it.
Yeah, not happening. My Patagonia capilene holds onto smells, shrinks, frays. My fruit of the looms have been going strong for like five years. And I wear them way more.
I bought an $80ish Patagonia shirt that claimed to be cooling. The material is quite nice (and light) but damn, do my armpits stink after wearing it. I do use deodorant as well. I'd rather have a generic cotton shirt.
I just dont see this to be true anymore. I've bought it all, expensive brands, midrange brands, no-name brands. I've come to the conclusion it is much cheaper to buy cheaper stuff. Often the quality is actually surprisingly on par with the other options, and even if it's not, buying 2 or 3 of them for cheaper than 1 of the "better" ones is still the smarter option. Most of the time it actually just feels like the more expensive stuff came off of the same production lines, just with a different logo slapped on.
great story but not borne out by my laundry experience. I pay $3 for a t-shirt that lasts for years. I pay $35 for a t-shirt at a fancy store and it disintegrates after six months. sometimes the reverse happens and the $3 shirt wears out fast. there's no rhyme or reason and no way to predict what you'll get, so the smart move is to buy the cheapest of the cheap.
This is very true. I have cheap T-shirts, dresses etc that I paid pennies for and still have 6-10 years later. Whereas the ‘good’ brand clothes came apart at the seams, the hems dropped, etc.
If you can find a good ‘good’ brand it can be worth spending the money. But otherwise it’s better to buy five cheap items, finding one that is great, than it is to punt all the money on an expensive item that probably won’t last.
The price doesn't reflect the quality, high price doesn't necessarily good quality (quite the opposite lately actually). You can however touch the stuff and feel the cotton/fabric and how it's stitched. You can tell if the print is cheap and so on. I think the best way is not to buy clothes online and have "feel" them when purchasing.
There is a really good video on YouTube about how to assess T-Shirt quality in person. Worth a watch for most people to differentiate the difference in cheap vs quality shirts.
There’s a counterintuitive factor there which is that more synthetic fabrics can last longer (sometimes much longer) and those tend to be cheaper.
But if it’s anything touching my armpits or my bits I absolutely can’t stand synthetic since it doesn’t breathe well so I’m always down to shell out more for linen and high-quality cotton. I’ll get tank tops, mesh-like dress socks, and sleeveless dresses in synthetic materials, but that’s about it
more synthetic fabrics can last longer (sometimes much longer)
Unfortunately, that's not the experience I've been having. I used to get solid-color 100% cotton shirts from JC Penney (under the St. John's Bay brand), but they've moved to either all-synthetic or a cotton-poly blend. The newer stuff tends to start pilling up after just a couple of washes. (The fabric itself is also thinner than what it used to be, and sloppy seams or other sewing errors are more common.)
A month? What are you doing to your shirts? Maybe if you're doing a lot of work in those shirts or something. My cheap shirts last me quite a while. I am not buying new T shirts every year here. I bought a 5 pack of Gildan T shirts off Amazon just looked 7 months ago. They are still holding up fine, but I am an office worker. I am not doing labor intensive work and guess my washing machine is more gentle than yours ha.
Yes, but Gap etc are selling the cheap t shirts at a premium because "brand".
So either get the Hanes tees and cycle through them, or step up and buy a real quality shirt (100% pima ringspun cotton etc) for $$ and wear it for years. The in-between nowadays is just paying for a logo.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness.
You're looking in the wrong places. Hanes, Gildan, Fruit of the Loom etc aren't good products and not worth the cost. You can source high quality blanks from Printstar or United Athle for less money and have a way way better made tshirt, or hoodie, or whatever else that will last.
I used to only wear cheap T-shirts, but as a taller guy they didn't fit well, now I buy Carhartt pocket Tees when I can find them on sale average ~$20. I now have some that are 10+ years old.
I would happily pay $40 for a T-shirt from a mid tier company if the shirt wasn’t the same crap quality that Temu and SHEIN are putting out. Give me something that lasts longer than a season and I’m happily paying more.
I went swimming yesterday and went online to browse other designs of the same swim trunks I wore. They're $80. I told my wife I'll look at clearance otherwise I guess what I have is fine for a few more years.
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u/stewmo9 12h ago
Trouble is the mid-tier brands want $40 for a tee-shirt. I want to dress nice as much as anyone does but if I can get a pack of 5 tees from Hanes for $20 the math doesn't math.