$3500 for a shirt?

[chris_gerrib]

Found via the great system of "dinking around on the Internet" comes this article $3500 shirt. The gist of the article is that, prior to the invention of mechanical looms, cloth was frighteningly expensive. Spinsters (AKA, "women who spun cloth via hand looms") might work 500 hours (that's 62.5 8-hour days or 2 months) just to make the cloth for one shirt! As a result, clothing was expensive, people didn't have a lot of it (2 or 3 outfits) and it was worn until it disintegrated.

The Goode Olde Dayes were not so good after all.

Comments

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Oh, but there's the other aspect as well:  Sanforizing was a thing of the future and dyes were not colorfast, so washing these products of human labor would simply ruin them.  Solution?  Never wash them.

[Or yourself, for that matter.  As W Manchester pointed out in A World Lit Only by Fire, prostitutes were the cleanest people in Europe, because they regularly washed their whole bodies.]

Now imagine attending a Shakespeare performance at the Globe Theatre circa AD 1600, after a hot summer's day.  The worst shanty-town in south India might compare.