Above is a graph from a relatively old paper that investigated the relationship between quality and price in an example garment – in this case, the research looked at women’s blazers. One hundred and nineteen blazers were assessed in terms of quality by two experts: one a university faculty member who taught textile science and the other a university class instructor who was previously a buyer for a department store and who taught clothing construction. Quality is on the x-axis and price is on the y-axis, with each dot-point representing a particular blazer. What you can see is nothing terribly surprising – there’s some sort of vague positive relationship between quality and price, so quality kind of goes up as price goes up, but it’s not a neat relationship. It’s quite noisy, really. And keep in mind this graph is from 1989, so clothing quality might have changed quite a bit relative to price over the past 23 years, with advancements in manufacturing techniques, the advent of fast fashion, developments in textile production, changes in brands and markets and profit expectations; all those sorts of things.
Whatever changes have occurred since that graph was published, it’s likely still safe to say that we’re probably on the money (or not, literally speaking) when we think that price is not necessarily an accurate indicator of quality.
But what do we use as indicators of quality? In fact, what are we even looking for when we search for quality?
We kind of all have a vague notion of what we mean when we say that we want to buy good quality garments – it means we want the garments to stay in good condition for a decently long period of time, to not have issues or wear out or fall apart to any significant extent. That’s all well and good, but that’s the sort of quality that you can only measure once you’ve already purchased and worn the garment. It’s easy to judge an item’s quality in retrospect (“Well, it was good quality, because it lasted really well!”) but it’s much much harder to judge an item’s quality in advance and get a good idea of how it will hold up in the future (“Oh this garment is good quality, so it will definitely last well!”). That is, it’s harder for people with little or no experience or training in garment construction and manufacture.
There are all sorts of information cues we can use to evaluate the quality of a garment, from intrinsic cues (e.g. fabric fibre content, seam type) and extrinsic cues (e.g. brand name, price) to aesthetic cues (e.g. colour, fit) and performance cues (r.g. durability, care instructions). The interesting thing to consider is: which cues are important to a person who has limited knowledge of garment construction and manufacture, and which cues become or remain important after that person has extensively learnt about garment construction and manufacture? What are naïve people getting right (if anything), and what things would be more important to them if they had a more extensive understanding of what genuinely makes a good quality item of clothing?
Some research has looked into exactly that. The study looked at the effect of knowledge on the types of information cues used to evaluate the quality of clothing. Sixty-five students were surveyed regarding which cues they considered most important in judging the quality of a garment. These 65 students had something in common: they were all enrolled in and about to start a 15-week course at university about the analysis of ready-to-wear clothing. Prior to starting their course, they were asked which cues were important, and then at the end of the course, they were asked the same again.
How did knowledge of clothing manufacture and construction change people’s ideas about which cues were important when judging the quality of clothes?
Cues that became quite a bit more important to more people after improved knowledge of garment construction and manufacture:
- Fibre content of fabric
- Interfacings
- Length of stitch
- Patterns (e.g. stripes, plaid) matched
- Seam width
- No mismatched thread
- Type of fabric
- Type of seam
- Width of hem
Cues that became quite a bit less important to more people after improved knowledge of garment construction and manufacture:
- Brand
- Closures
- Colour
- How fashionable the garment is
- Fit
- How the fabric feels
- Price
- The store selling the garment
- Whether the style suits one’s figure
You have to be careful with the interpretation of these results, since it’s just about the relative change in ranking of the different cues – for example, “fit” may have dropped in the rankings of importance after the course compared to before, but it might still be towards the top of the rankings. Maybe it dropped from being the 2nd most important cue to being the 7th most important cue out of the 24 cues investigated, so while it did become less important, it’s still considered pretty important overall. All the same, this study shows how much your perspective can change when given adequate information, and at the very least, it certainly makes me aware of all the cues that might matter if only I knew.
This did make me figure something out, though: the sort of information you need to be able to evaluate quality can’t be accessed so easily, possibly because there’s so much of it. There aren’t many web guides to quality garment construction because there would be just so much information to cover. But if the internet doesn’t have the information, how about we go back in time and use something a bit more old-fashioned: textbooks. That would certainly be a convenient option for accessing this sort of information. Well, it would be a more convenient option if textbooks weren’t always so expensive, particularly since the one I’ve found that seems most relevant isn’t in any convenient library catalogues and isn’t priced any better than retail on eBay. But maybe spending a bit of money on an undoubtedly useful and highly informative textbook would be quite a wise investment.
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