Why Do Clothes Suck Now?

Culture Study Podcast

Anne Helen Petersen

Fashion & Beauty, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2023

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For the maiden voyage of the Culture Study podcast, we’re taking a hard look at a problem that plagues us all: terrible clothes. Why are shirts falling apart or pilling after just a few wears? Why does Gucci charge $3200 for a polyester sweater? What happened to ironing and will we ever dry clean en masse again?

Amanda Mull, staff writer at The Atlantic, joins me for a deep dive into the past twenty years of fashion production (and consumption) trends.

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Show notes:* The tweet I describe in the beginning of the podcast* Read Amanda Mull’s piece in The Atlantic: “Your Sweaters Are Garbage”* Read Sarah Zhang’s piece in The Atlantic: “How I Got Bamboo-zled by Baby Clothes”* Amanda mentioned: Sofi Thanhauser’s Worn: A People’s History of Clothing* Some other Amanda pieces I love: Millennials Have Lost Their Grip on Fashion, The Free-Returns Party Is Over, How Shoppers Got Tricked By Vegan Leather* You can see Amanda’s Jeffrey Dahmer glasses in the bio of her Instagram (which is private, so don’t friend request unless you actually know her)* Paul Mescal’s rat tail situation (perhaps more appropriately called a mullet)

This week, we’re looking for your questions for future episodes about:* Resurgent interest in early 2000s music (with Switched on Pop’s Nate Sloan)* The Mean Girls Trailer* A deep analysis of Taylor and Travis Kelce discourse* Kevin Bacon’s Hott Instagram and Gen-X/Elder Millennial Instagram in general* “Little treat” culture* You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here.

To hear more, visit culturestudypod.substack.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	So what we're going to do first is we're going to look at a tweet that you are familiar with
0:04.5	because you wrote about it. So I'm going to put the tweet in our little chat here.
0:09.7	Okay.
0:10.7	This is a retweet of a picture from film updates.
0:18.5	It's a picture of Billy Crystal in like a big, luxurious white sweater and jeans,
0:26.0	like white dad sneakers, his like iconic outfit from when Harry met Sally. And then next to him
0:34.5	is Ben Schwartz doing a similar look.
0:38.9	And the comment is from a user named Ellery Smith, and it says,
0:42.1	The quality of sweaters has declined so greatly in the last 20 years that I think it genuinely necessitates a national conversation.
0:49.9	What do you spot immediately when you're looking at the differences between the two?
0:54.8	The biggest difference, I mean, there's a lot of, like, aesthetic differences here.
0:58.4	I think Ben did sort of a half-assed job of this, if we're being totally honest.
1:03.3	But the biggest difference is what Ellery refers to in her tweet is that the sweater that
1:10.7	Billy Crystal is wearing from Harry Met Sally
1:13.6	is just this sort of like voluminous, fluffy, comfortable looking thick, like richly cabled
1:20.3	sweater. And then Ben next to him is wearing a sweater that first of all has a different cut.
1:26.0	It's cut much closer to the body. It doesn't
1:28.7	have like the volume or the heft of Billy's sweater. It has a bunch of cabling on it, but
1:34.4	everything about it just looks sort of like thin and flat and sort of less rich compared to the
1:41.7	sweater that Billy was wearing. It's just a worse sweater, honestly.
1:48.2	This is the Culture Study podcast, and I'm Ann Helen Peterson. I'm Amanda Moll. I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic.
1:54.4	We are talking about clothes and all of their very crappiness and why they are that way.
	...

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