When I was 12 or 13, my mom and I didn’t have fun shopping for clothes together. All I wanted was a wardrobe – especially one with early-1990s brand faves like Esprit and Au Coton – to meet the standard I had gleaned from a teen magazine: you could not wear the same thing twice in a two-week span. The horror!
But my mom had a planned budget, and stuck to it. It was a constant battle of wills, and in full control of the purse, my mom usually won. Several times, a visit to one of Edmonton’s malls ended in tears, for both of us.
Those fraught shopping excursions came to mind this month with a Globe analysis using Statistics Canada data on apparel prices. It made clear that clothing is not as dear as it was in the days when I pined for a Club Monaco sweatshirt.
As The Globe’s Matt Lundy reports, Canadian clothing and footwear prices have dropped 4.4 per cent from 2023, according to the Consumer Price Index. And during a longer span, between May, 2020, and May, 2024 – which includes the period when inflation ran high – the price growth for key items such as transportation, accommodation, and food was well above 20 per cent. Clothing and footwear, in contrast, grew by a modest 3.8 per cent. But the pandemic-era numbers are not the astounding part: since the turn of the century overall unadjusted consumer prices have jumped 72 per cent. But nominal prices for clothing and footwear have dropped 7.4 per cent.
In inflation-adjusted dollars, clothing and footwear prices have plummeted by 46 per cent since 1999. This tracks with my experience: I recently found a crumpled Bootlegger receipt among my childhood belongings that shows I bought two shirts there in 1997 for $22 and $44. It’s not all that different than what you might spend today.
The positive side of this is that clothing costs ease the effects of inflation: The kids might never be able to afford a down payment for a house, and will struggle to pay rent, but they’re more likely to be well-attired. But a world awash in textiles is not necessarily a good thing, for a number of reasons.
Global textile production is responsible for far too much water pollution. The industry is responsible for up to eight per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Of course, there is a significant upside to this manufacturing for the economies of countries such as Bangladesh or Vietnam. But apart from the environmental cost, journalists and human rights groups have also highlighted the toll on people. Shein, the Chinese retailer that does an estimated tens of billions of dollars in online clothing sales each year, has been under the microscope for using suppliers where low-paid employees work 17 hours a day. And it shows. Last week on the Shein site, a top and leggings set for girls was going for about $6. (Earlier this year, Saturday Night Live had a dark skit parodying this type of fast fashion, with one of the spoof-commercial taglines being that the clothes contain “minimal lead.” That joke was too real in Canada last week, as Health Canada issued a recall notice for girls’ shorts from Giant Tiger because the buttons “contain lead in excess of allowable limits.”)
Canada, with higher environmental and labour standards, no longer has the textile industry it once did. Chatelaine said the domestic garment sector flourished well into the 1990s, when 70 per cent of the textile and clothing products consumed in Canada were also made here. For all the benefits of free trade, the decision to cut duties on imports from the world’s developing countries two decades ago has played a major role in making the onshore manufacturing of clothes a niche industry.
Then there is the absolute waste: so many things end up in the back of a closet, and then in the garbage. On an individual level in Canada, clothes now are a lot like photos: We have too many. Because of that, they’re not as special and cherished as they once were.
Back in the 1990s, I did get the freedom to buy the clothes I wanted once I started babysitting and working part-time at McDonald’s. That particular variety of youthful angst eased.
Paying for clothes myself made me appreciate my shoes and shirts more. With that in mind, with my own kids the focus is on quality over quantity, and being a part of a massive friends-and-family hand-me-down operation.
But even still, there‘s too much stuff. And I realize now, as much as I resented the cost of clothing when I was entering my teens, that relative scarcity meant that each garment was all the more valuable to me.