The high end of clothing is pretty much entirely veblen pricing - I sew for a hobby, and the maximally nice suit would cost: 6 meters of high-end wool fabric: 120 euro. 5 meters of silk for lining: 70 euro. Bits and bobs (Buttons, ect) 10. Doing the whole thing without shortcuts (French seams, double stitching).. 15 hours? For me. An actual tailor is likely faster, but even at first world wages, its another 300 euro, max, so totals out to 500 euro. Sanity checking this by looking up the local tailors rates for a suit... yup, 500 to 800.
Any suit costing more than this is entirely down to people paying over the odds to show they have money to burn. Or not realizing that their clothing budget has reached the point where they should just stop trying to find nicer things in the shops and get everything tailored.
I self taught sewing via the internet and deconstructing worn out bits of my wardrobe. Which led to 2 hilarious realizations.
1: jeans are the pinnacle of industrial clothing production. All the seams are done right, the edges are folded in so nothing can unravel, the stress points are reinforced, the sizing system makes actual sense, and the cloth is basically indestructible. And they are cheap.
2; Everything else. And I do mean every single other item of clothing that I owned that had been bought in a shop? Soddy manufacture. Things that cost easily 3 times as much as a pair of jeans were manufactured to nowhere near as high a standard. And looking at the detail work in more upscale establishments than I usually buy at indicate that doesn't actually change much at all going up the price scale. And this is for mens wear. The things people foist on women make me want to cry.
Happy New Year, everyone!
In the past few months I've been thinking several thoughts that all seem to point in the same direction:
1) People who live in developed Western countries usually make and spend much more money than people in poorer countries, but aren't that much happier. It feels like we're overpaying for happiness, spending too much money to get a single bit of enjoyment.
2) When you get enjoyment from something, the association between "that thing" and "pleasure" in your mind gets stronger, but at the same time it becomes less sensitive and requires more stimulus. For example if you like sweet food, you can get into a cycle of eating more and more food that's sweeter and sweeter. But the guy next door, who's eating much less and periodically fasting to keep the association fresh, is actually getting more pleasure from food than you are! The same thing happens when you learn to deeply appreciate certain kinds of art, and then notice that the folks who enjoy "low" art are visibly having more fun.
3) People sometimes get unrealistic dreams and endlessly chase them, like trying to "make it big" in writing or sports, because they randomly got rewarded for it at an early age. I wrote a post about that.
I'm not offering any easy answers here. But it seems like too many people get locked in loops where they spend more and more effort to get less and less happiness. The most obvious examples are drug addiction and video gaming, but also "one-itis" in dating, overeating, being a connoisseur of anything, striving for popular success, all these things follow the same pattern. You're just chasing after some Skinner-box thing that you think you "love", but it doesn't love you back.
Sooo... if you like eating, give yourself a break every once in a while? If you like comfort, maybe get a cold shower sometimes? Might be a good idea to make yourself the kind of person that can get happiness cheaply.
Sorry if this post is not up to LW standards, I typed it really quickly as it came to my mind.