Mildly triggering because this was like the coolest store back in the day, but I could never afford it because my family's middle class.

Now that I'm here, I'm noticing two main things.

One is that everything is kind of affordable, which was definitely not the case in high school.

The other thing that I'm noticing is that everything is just a little bit shittier than you would want it to be.

I'm seeing a lot of like loose threads on things and a lot of stuff that's just made out of 100% synthetic fabrics.

The clothing just doesn't feel like this nice, firm, high quality that I associated with Abercrombie.

Abercrombie still does sell some high quality clothing.

Actually, I really like this dress and would totally buy it.

And I'm glad they've decided to start using normal lighting in their stores, but seeing so much cheap and low quality stuff there made me wonder, did clothing used to be better when I was a teenager?

Not just at Abercrombie, but across the board.

So I scoured eBay, Depop, and Poshmark for clothes from trusted brands of the 90s and 2000s.

Then I went to those same stores and bought the 2024 version of each item.

Abercrombie was like legendary for really high quality denim.

To compare the old and new,

I got help from Amanda McCarty.

I worked as a buyer in the fashion industry for about 20 years.

In the span of my career,

I saw how what we sell people changed.

The two major changes, I would say, are one, nothing fits properly anymore.

It's not you.

It's nothing about your body.

You're great.

And two, the longevity of these clothes, even how you feel when you put them on, has degraded so much.

It's just not a good deal.

It's not just in my head.

It has gotten harder to find quality clothes that last, even at brands you used to like.

If you're wondering why, keep watching.

I want you to think about how many new pieces of clothing you bought last year.

If you're anything like the average American, it was around 68.

In 1980, that number was 12.

But wait, it gets crazier.

In the 80s, Americans spent about 7% of their annual income on clothes.

Today, it's just 3%.

We spend half as much, even though we're buying five times more.

This Abercrombie ad from the 80s helps explain why.

The high quality wool was a huge selling point.

They even tell you exactly where it's from.

And notice how they say this is part of their fall collection?

Because in the 80s and 90s, stores only had new clothes a couple times a year, usually a spring-summer collection and a fall-winter collection.

And designers would start working on each collection up to nine months in advance, because clothing production takes a lot of work.

They had to think of hundreds of unique designs and whittle them down to the dozen or so best ones, send the designs to the factory, go back and forth with them for months to create a prototype, choose the best fabric, the right embellishments, and figure out the proportions for different sizes.

After all that, they'd place a massive order with the factory and then just pray the design would sell.

It was kind of like a game of chance.

You'd place two huge bets per year, and if your styles flopped, you'd be stuck with a whole bunch of clothes you'd have to sell at a discount or just throw away.

That risk is why so much care and thoughtfulness went into making each piece of clothing and why you could expect quality at every price point.

Even discount stores like Sears or JCPenney.

Just look at the way JCPenney advertised their suits in this ad from the 80s.

Two-piece suits that are expertly tailored, classically designed, and have an elegant touch.

They're not selling you on the price or the trendiness, but on the craftsmanship and design.

Even one of the cheaper suits on the market was still pretty high quality, which is probably why if you adjust for inflation, this $160 suit would cost $600 today.

If you go to JCPenney now, you can easily get a two-piece suit for under $200.

So in the 80s and 90s, people were buying fewer clothes, but they'd be well-made pieces that would be worn for years.

And keeping up with all the trends, well, that was something only wealthy people could do.

Pull the latest brionis and charge them to our account.

Yes, ma'am.

What are brionis?

Six months of my car payments plus a car.

Then came a little store called Zara, and everything began to change.

The New York Times coined the term fast fashion in this 1989 article about the first US store of Zara.

The latest trend is what we're after, a Zara executive told the Times.

It takes 15 days between a new idea and getting it into the stores.

Remember, that took most stores nine months.

How did Zara do it in 15 days?

By streamlining this part of the production process with something called Greige Goods.

Rather than manufacturing overseas,

Zara built their own high-tech factories in Spain, all connected to headquarters by an underground monorail.

There, robots working around the clock cut and dye fabrics to create unfinished, uncolored pieces that can be turned into any garment.

Once a design is created, Zara can send those Greige Goods to their network of small shops in nearby regions where they're transformed into finished dresses, trousers, and tops.

Instead of huge orders,

Zara makes a small batch of each style to start with.

The retail stores can then send feedback to headquarters about what's selling and what's not, and they can quickly ramp up production on whatever's popular, restocking within days if needed.

It massively reduced the risk that came with clothing production.

Instead of losing money on clearance sales or throwing away unsold goods,

Zara's styles often sell out quickly.

The designers don't have to predict trends a year in advance.

They can just respond to fashion trends as they emerge, though sometimes that gets a little sketchy.

For example, here's a look from the high fashion designer Celine from a collection that debuted on the Vogue runway in 2013.

This skirt would have retailed for at least $1,000, and here's a very similar-looking skirt selling on Zara's website for just $80.

According to the Wayback Machine,

Zara had this skirt for sale by August, which would have been just a few weeks after Celine's version landed in boutiques.

These runway knockoffs and how quickly Zara could get them into stores were wildly popular.

By August 2008, Zara's parent company, Inditex, became the world's largest fashion retailer.

This is also when you had the rise of two other fast fashion giants of the new millennium,

Forever 21 and H&M, which pioneered a new way to bring the runway to the masses.

They'd partner with luxury designers to make exclusive lines for H&M at affordable prices, starting with Karl Lagerfeld in 2004.

Karl, is it true?

Of course it's true.

This part of the story, it seems sort of like a win for the 99%.

Fast fashion was making it so that anyone could wear runway designs while they were still popular.

That was a new thing.

Of course, encouraging lots of consumers to buy low cost clothes that would go out of style quickly would shockingly have some downsides too, but we'll come back to that.

Because we can't give the minds behind Zara and H&M all the credit for the rise of fast fashion.

We also have to give some credit to Bill Clinton?

No, not because of his sick style.

In 1994, President Clinton signed NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it cheaper to make clothes in Mexico.

And a few years later, he normalized trade relations with China.

Textile factories started moving out of the U.S.

because now clothing retailers had access to the largest pool of cheap labor in human history.

Luckily, there was a law from the 70s, the Multifiber Arrangement, which limited how much clothing American and European countries could import from other nations.

Unfortunately, the World Trade Organization let it expire in 2005, ushering the heyday of fast fashion.

Because now, there was nothing stopping companies from producing everything in the countries with the lowest wages, the fewest labor laws, and the laxest environmental regulations.

We've arrived at the fashion landscape that I remember from my teens.

In the 2000s, you had four distinct buying options ranging in price and quality.

High fashion or luxury brands, department stores, mall brands, and fast fashion.

But these days, it kind of feels like the bottom of this pyramid has collapsed and everything's a little cheaper and shittier.

J.Crew, Anthropologie, Abercrombie, these didn't used to be considered fast fashion, but now they arguably are.

And that's because of two very big things that changed the experience of shopping into the hellscape of today.

The first is the 2008 financial crisis.

Middle-class consumers no longer had as much money to spend, so they began drifting over to cheaper options.

While all of the other non-fast fashion retailers were struggling, Forever 21 was opening store after store after store.

H&M, the same thing.

Zara is spreading into other cities.

And so the conversation began, how do we compete here?

What if we continue to show the same prices on the price tags that we always have, but we know that we're gonna sell most of the units of that style on sale?

And we planned for that.

So let's say this dress costs $40 to make, and it retailed for $100 in 2007.

In 2010, during the recession, the retailer would keep the price tag at $100, but expect that most pieces will only sell once it goes on sale.

So they'll only spend, let's say, $15 to make it, so they'll still make a profit.

And how do you make clothes for cheap?

Well, by making cheaper clothes.

You add synthetic materials like polyester instead of selling pure natural fibers like cotton and wool.

You skimp on details like pockets, buttons, and zippers, and offer less sizes.

I could see all these things play out in the clothing I bought, like these men's jeans from Abercrombie from the 2000s versus now.

The vintage pair weighs a hefty 761 grams and is 100% cotton.

They feel substantial, long-lasting, really high-quality denim.

They have a decent amount of distressing on here that was probably done by hand to sort of break down areas, make them softer.

In the fast fashion era, a lot of this is skipped, where it's just like, let's just spray them with acid or do other things that are actually very toxic.

The new pair weighs less at 720 grams and is a cotton-elastane blend.

This is that fast fashion trick of, okay, if we add a little bit of stretch, it will fit more people, theoretically, and they'll be less likely to return them.

But putting elastane in jeans shortens the lifespan pretty significantly.

Those elastane fibers that are woven in here, they're plastic, and they break.

And the more you wash them, the sooner they break, but you get into this cycle where you have to wash the jeans more often to get them to go back to size because they get stretched out.

The other main difference between these jeans, the zippers.

We have a legit, luxurious zipper, long-lasting, 100% metal.

They smoothly go up and down.

These are things that you take for granted until you get a bad zipper.

The new pair, when you were trying to unzip these, that sound, you can feel like this zipper's gonna be a problem soon.

This is a difference of maybe 50 cents, but it's a pennies game to get the pricing to work with the targets you're given.

Another area that you can really see how quality degraded is with sweaters.

We compared an anthropology sweater from today to a vintage sweater made in the 90s.

This sweater is Liz Claiborne, which is like anthropology before anthropology.

The vintage sweater is 100% wool.

The one made today is 100% polyester.

The vintage sweater has metal buttons.

The other one has no buttons at all.

The vintage sweater is a size medium.

The one made today is one size.

When I see one size in something, I'm like, oh, it's because they couldn't afford to buy it in sizes to meet the margin targets.

Even with all these cost-cutting measures, traditional retailers were struggling.

And that's around the time private equity firms started buying them up, saddling them with debt, and letting all the business decisions be made by finance bros whose idea of fashion is that Patagonia vest over a gingham shirt.

And on top of all that, there's still that other huge change that I mentioned, the final death knell in quality clothing, the internet.

Social media and fast fashion are a match made in heaven.

Social media helps shorten our attention spans, which extends to fashion trends too, which cycle through faster and faster.

That makes fast fashion indispensable to influencers who rely on a steady stream of new clothes for their content.

This puts pressure on all of us to wear a totally unique, never-before-seen outfit every single day, which is pretty hard.

Lizzie McGuire, you are an outfit repeater.

I guess now it's time to talk about Sheehan,

Zara's more chaotic little sister.

Sheehan is the logical conclusion of fast fashion.

Sheehan is a company that focuses on selling as much hyper-trendy, super low-quality clothing they can for mind-blowingly cheap prices.

Sheehan raked in close to $10 billion in 2020.

It's currently the biggest clothing retailer in the world, even beating out Amazon in the U.S.

Sheehan is not just fast fashion, it's instant fashion.

Zara can get products from drawing board to store and Sheehan can do it in three.

Zara can release 35,000 new items of clothes per year.

Sheehan will release that many in just a couple of weeks.

So how do they do it?

Rather than functioning as a cohesive clothing manufacturer with its own factories like Zara,

Sheehan is more like Amazon, a huge marketplace selling clothes from thousands of independent Chinese factories.

And it treats those factories sort of like Uber treats its drivers.

The factories are hooked up to Sheehan's software that collects real-time feedback about which items are selling well and which aren't.

The software then sends alerts to the factory owners' phones to ramp up or slow down production.

It's Zara's small-batch production on steroids.

And just like other billionaires,

Sheehan finds creative ways to avoid U.S. taxes.