Kontextmaschine

16th May 2023

Post reblogged from left unity with 1,466 notes

quoms:
shopping for vintage clothes really makes you appreciate just how much capitalist innovation is dedicated to making things suck ass. every year someone finds a way to produce clothes that are worse than any clothes that have existed before in human history and they make one billion dollars from it. H&M stuff from circa 2010 has appreciably better construction and materials than the bulk of mass market goods today, and that’s roughly a decade ago. the shit you could get in a department store in 1970? the shit you could get in a department store in nineteen fucking seventy?
This is also the problem with the new-build “gentrification buildings” that are cluttering your downtown, by the way. Three or four residential floors over retail is actually pretty much the ideal form of urban architecture, it’s just that those buildings are being constructed as cheaply as possible - and in the intervening 70 years between when we abandoned mixed-use and then started building it again, “as cheaply as possible” changed beyond recognisability, because every single year in that time some engineer or developer was finding new ways to cut corners and shave off costs.
Other historical forms of plentiful, mass-market architecture were equally driven by cost considerations. Quirky Victorian houses have all that decoration largely due to the invention of pre-made architectural finishes you could buy at the store, instead of needing to custom-design everything and have it crafted to order. The Sears homes of turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs are called that because they were mass-produced designs that you literally bought from a catalog and then had delivered and built yourself - pretty much the cost/value equivalent of department store clothing. The number of “innovations” in materials and design processes since that time (in particular, the fact that so many projects are now designed front-to-back by a structural engineer with an architect only signing off at the end) renders those older cheap buildings incredibly luxurious by comparison.

I’d say the Sears catalog era where you’d buy a plan and acquire materials to execute it locally is cognate to home production of clothes using McCall’s patterns and locally acquired fabric and thread, which was still a thing (particularly for dresses) into the 1950s and 60s (and which I did as my interdisciplinary middle school graduation project, since skipping me in Computer class meant I never actually got taught to see in Home Ec)