Why is everything such shit quality!?

[gigipom]

even higher end brands.

I spent £150 on a dress from Massimo Dutti, which was machine washable 30 degrees. I hand washed cool to be extra safe and it shrunk.

my dresses from COS, Sezane all feel a bit naff after a few wears and have pulls in them. Knitwear bobbles so fast.

I went for a look around some shops today and I couldn’t believe how shit the quality was of everything. Everything is mixed with a synthetic fabric, but still charging an extortionate amount.

that and just the general styles coming in for autumn are 🤮 (looking at you, Zara).

Many shops are trying to have a different brand from their competitors yet offer the same, lower or only marginally better quality. If they offered style and good quality then people would buy I think

The poor quality is so disappointing, polyester dresses with nothing in the seams, loose buttons and £100+ price tags seem to have become the norm.
Like so many other posters I have 20 year old clothes that wash, wear and hold their shape better than things I've bought months ago.
Thank you for all the recommendations.

I’m glad it’s not just me that is finding this. I buy a lot from Mint Velvet, Whistles, Reiss, Boden. Not particularly cheap stores compared to other high street brands. So many things I buy just don’t last. Stitching comes undone, buttons fall off, fabric frays and holes appear after just one or two wears…even after a cool and delicate wash. I find Ted Baker to be pretty good, otherwise I am shifting to cheaper brands (eg. Next) because I don’t see the benefit to paying sightly more for clothes any more

Interesting MaxMara has come up because I was going to say Marina Rinaldi which is basically their plus size range.

In the noughties Marina Rinaldi was rather wonderful - a friend of mine put on weight due to medication and was in despair, but we went shopping and found the most beautiful, Helmut Lang level, jersey pieces in the MR concession in Harvey Nichols. Now it seems to be mostly garish polyester, with very rare nicer pieces for about a billion pounds.

I’ve tried recommending the brand here occasionally and been torn to shreds because it doesn’t all cost £3.99 …

I have M&S sweatshirts bought last century that are still wearable - faded but not worn and the stitching is.still.good.

Another dressmaker and one thing most of us do is pre-wash our fabrics because we know that even the good stuff will shrink by up to 15%. Some of the knits distort pretty badly in that pre-wash, too, but at least you just end up with a slightly wonky print rather than twisted seams.

@PickAChew I bought an old St Michael dress from a charity shop that is made of viscose. The belt was missing ( cheap Primark belt does the job and even has shoulder pads listed on the inner label. The quality is fab and I have had so many compliments on it!

I have a French Connection skirt from over 20 years ago, a full length white one, that still gets worn every summer holiday. The quality was fantastic but that’s when they didn’t do such a large range. I remember shopping in the mid 1990s, French Connection, Warehouse and Oasis were like boutiques, not massive ranges and comparatively more expensive but some beautiful clothes that you wanted to buy.
Recent successes, Frame jeans (the outnet or brand alley), I have a lovely Bella Freud wool jumper (sample sale find), I picked up a navy and white dress in linen in Reiss which seems to be going well but I know Reiss can be hit or miss these days. Agree with Brora, and I have some good pieces from jigsaw, especially their t shirts (although they seem to have changed the sizing over the last year or so).

I'm not particularly interested in fashion, but I do appreciate good quality.

Rohan is another store whose outdoor/travel wear has gone rapidly downhill. It's now cheap and nasty in the main, as well as massively overpriced.

I buy it on EBay instead. The older stuff is much better quality.

I think manufacturers have put up prices to claw back money lost during pandemic

It strikes me that part of the problem is there just seems to be so much choice in each shop these days. I’m guessing the more lines a shop has, the more expensive it must be to produce. We wouldn’t need as much choice if things were good quality and well designed. It’s actually quite overwhelming. Somewhere like Marks tries to be all things to all people. Why also start selling other brands you can buy direct. Pick a lane.

What I don't like about M&S is that done things they sell are online only. I want to see it all in a shop, have a good range of sizes available, be able to see and feel the material and examine the stitching. Sometimes even their own branded stuff is not in the store and the sales assistant always says it's available online but if I wanted to do that, I'd not have bothered going shopping!

And if I do spot something online that I'm tempted by, it's invariably out of stock, but still showing on the website, to tantalise me with things I cannot have!

Viscose is not plastic - it’s made from wood pulp, albeit with quite a lot of processing.

I agree that shit quality in general is an issue though.

i do think that clothes bought now are relatively cheap compared to what they were in the 1990s for example. My first proper camel smart coat cost £100 (thanks Mum!). I couldn’t have afforded to buy it myself. Last year I wanted a camel coat again and bought one from Mango. I avoided the £70 synthetic one and bought the wool wrap one for £100. Unlike my 1990s one it isn’t lined and doesn’t have much tailoring to it and I suspect it won’t stay looking good for long. It was either that or Max Mara for £££. I suspect the equivalent of that 1990s coat would cost £300 but perhaps we are so used to cheaper clothes that we would hesitate to pay that.

This is a big part of the problem. You just could not buy new clothes at comparably cheap prices prior to the 2000s. Even Primark etc were nothing like as cheap as now (comparatively).

Cheap fashion helps people on very low incomes, but has created expectations that are impossible for manufacturers to meet, except by ruining quality. It's easy to say that we are willing to pay more for quality, and I'm sure some of us are, but the fact is that most brands that did used to provide better quality clothes found that they lost their customers to cheaper competitors.

I’m wondering whether textile manufacturing and garment manufacturing are now so geared up towards fast fashion that even if you wanted to produce good quality garments you now can’t. Unless you do it in house in small runs and it gets Max Mara levels of expensive.

I agree that quality seems to have gone downhill a lot.

Are there any online brands that anyone would recommend? @CapaciousHag you mentioned you avoid shit clothing?
I’ve shopped recently with Woolover, Seasalt. Interestingly a couple people have mentioned MaxMara, but I was looking at one of the £600 coats in January, and I was shocked at the poor finish of it.

I’m middle aged and overweight, the quality of the high street has deteriorated so much that supermarket clothing - Tu, George, etc - actually now don’t compare that badly against them, imv.

People's desire for fast fashion have driven this too as well as the desire to pay peanuts. Every retailer is trying to grab the consumer and it is a balance between price and look and possibly some ethical stuff thrown in there too. I have bought from various levels over the last couple of years and have found that in general M and S are still good quality - except for sweaters etc. I cannot talk about those as I won't wear or even look at that recycled nonsense. Primark stuff is crap and it looks it. It ranks with Shein and all these other Chinese online companies. H and M and Zara vary and they have differing price levels too - their 50 quid stuff tends to be good and at a different level. With the higher end High St brands it again varies. You go into somewhere like Whistles and generally clothes are well made. For some reason I never end up buying from them. I do find Mint Velvet a good retailer but most of the better companies are on line. John Lewis is a good source too. I suppose we need all the levels as not everyone can afford Me and Em plus there are the people who want to wear something different each time they go out.

@FeelingHelpless99 at that price point, it would have been one of the diffusion lines, which are as generally bad as other high street brands. The only diffusion brand I think consistently good is MHL (MM6 nearly) -- their MO is literally to cash in on a brand.

Oh God, @FeelingHelpless99, if you looked through even the last 6 months of my S&B posting you’d run out of known numbers to count the apoplectic posts excoriating my suggestions! I’ve taken to carefully explaining across paragraphs that the brands I’m linking or showing photos of can be bought in the sales or on pre-owned sites. Doesn’t help …

The thing is - I shop online and, because of the years and years I spent trying on clothes in concrete shops at every price point, I don’t find that problematic. But I do see that for anyone who never shops beyond the shopping mall a couple of miles away, it might be daunting to press buy now on a website you’ve never seen before.

Anyway - this is the thread you want. (You’ll need a couple of hours at least.):

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/style_and_beauty/4753001-can-we-talk-about-clothing-brands-and-target-demographics?reply=124266319

Yes, I thought it might be - I couldn’t remember - possibly MM Weekend. It was an unlined coat.

Oh, thanks, @CapaciousHag !

checks diary

I hate shopping, waste, and decision making, so I’d be happy to spend a bit more…

…. however I’m so overweight I’m loath to invest (and beginning to worry about how long this interim hiatus might last!)

I agree with pp, we've got used to low prices and our expectations of what a piece of clothing should cost is distorted. I remember as a teenager in the 90s, Select and Pilot were the cheaper end of the high street but their prices from the 90s are actually comparable to current brands/store like boohoo, PLT in 2023.

I imagine a dress retailing at £50 in the 90s should realistically cost more than double that in today's money. We've accepted price increases in other things like food (bar chicken), energy, housing and services but when it comes to clothes, we won't accept paying more.

There’s an excellent writer/social media influencer called Andrea Cheong who talks very well about this and reviews various brands for longevity. She’s taught me a lot about how to check clothes for good workmanship and read fabric labels. Think she has a book now but you’d learn lots just from following her Insta. She’s very very plummy sounding and only young but really knows her stuff.

She tends to rate Cos (esp trousers) and Uniqlo (e.g. linens) and often quite harsh about brands like &OtherStories which are pricy but often just fast fashion quality. It’s always on a case by case though.

She’s taught me a lot about how to check clothes for good workmanship and read fabric labels.

Interesting - are you English by heritage, @playgroundwarrior? I’m not, on either side, and that sort of knowledge is something I was brought up with from earliest childhood. I do sometimes wonder if the general disdain for craftsmanship in dressmaking here (England / MN) stems from a vague feeling that maintaining one’s wardrobe is a matter for seamstresses and ladies’ maids - not the lady of the house. To me it seems incredible that anyone would need SM to teach them about the basics of clothing.

But that probably reads as incredibly snotty - which really isn’t my intention. I’m just musing.