Closed jokosanyang closed 5 years ago
jokosanyang
commented
5 years ago 
Fweddi
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5 years ago I spent the day researching what factors we could use to help calculate the lifetime of clothing items.
I had assumed that expensive items would last longer than cheap items, but Dr Mark Sumner, from the University of Leeds, challenges that idea [1].
“Some of the garments performed very well across a wide range of tests - more often than not, the best products were 'fast fashion' products"
He suggests that we often throw away clothes for ulterior reasons.
“What we know from talking to some charity organisations, an awful lot of the clothing has nothing wrong with it. It has no holes in it, it's still functional. “We suspect the consumer is offloading garments because they no longer like them or want them.”
When it comes to materials, Sumner suggests that synthetics (such as polyesters) last longer than organic materials (such as cotton) [2].
The problem with natural fibres is they definitely have a shelf life and they will wear out far quicker, generally, than a manmade fibre.
But there are lot of other factors at play. What type of polyester? How closely have the strands been woven together? And what other pollutants does polyester release?
NB: The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has a very good appendix on the advantages and disadvantages of different materials [3].
There is some data out there on the average uses of different garment types. In 2018, My Voucher Codes surveyed 2,586 people from around the UK on their shopping habits. Items such as dresses and high heels are worn a lot less than items such as trainers and jeans [4]. This data-set isn't massive but it is promising.
Some brands have a reputation of creating long-lasting clothes: Levi's, Patagonia, Ralph Lauren. [5] Others such as Primark are a lot more hit and miss. We could create a lookup table for brands that have a good or bad reputation - but how we decide this is ultimately up to us, as there is no concrete data out there on which brands create long-lasting clothes.
Developing countries might be more exploitative, but you get this in the UK too - in parts of Leicester, workers are paid as little as £3.50 an hour [6]. And products made abroad are getting better - some cities in China, for example, are highly specialised just in textiles [7].
Even if we could factor this in, it seems for some reason that online retailers don't need to cite the country of manufacture on their product pages. So I'm not sure we can use this factor.
The 'trendn' API on the Rakuten marketplace seems to be defunct [8]. Private AI firms are using big data to track fashion trends [9], but I have yet to find any data that is publicly accessible.
We could use Google Trends - but it depends on whether we can actually extract accurately what type of product it is we're looking at. For example, 'ASOS DESIGN relaxed shirt with conversational palm' won't get any hits on Google Trends. 'Tropical print' on the other hand, might.
Google Trends is good at detecting seasonal trends and fads. 'Morph suit', for example, is a popular search term at Halloween, and 'choker' saw a surge in popularity in 2016. But it is harder to plot long-term trends for items such as leopard-print coats, as these are only popular in the winter, so you have to plot a 'line of best fit' to smooth out the seasonal variation.
Glamour has their own 'cost per wear' calculator [10]. It asks the user questions such as what season you imagine using the item in, how many years will you use it for, how many times a week, what type of item. Some of this does almost sound like 'how many times will you use this?' but I think it is a good starting point.