In my pursuit of the perfect pair of jeans, I stumbled upon a Levi’s sale at the Natick Mall last night. And walked out of the store with a pair of their straight leg, Eco (15% recycled cotton) jeans with a nice medium-dark rinse and no pre-break-in (woohoo!) for $14.95.
At that price you may wonder why I only left with one pair, and that is because even when I espy a bargain I still have shopping ethics that can be summed up as efficient. My sartorial aim is to be high quality and well edited – I have never really been a clotheshorse.
Now, $14.95 is not only a far cry from $285, but it’s also not a normal retail price even for these jeans. They are normally about $69.95, and were on deep, deep discount to make room for new merchandise.
I decided one nice pair of jeans I can respectably wear pretty much everywhere was certainly worth even $69.95 never mind less than 21% of that, so I went for it.
At 1% spandex and with a slight gaping in the back waistband (very tough for me to avoid, honestly) they are also a far cry from perfect. But for Salvation Army prices, I can take the time to put a dart or two in the back if it really bothers me.
What this brings up for me is, were these jeans fairly priced even at $69.95? Meaning, should they have been charging more because they should have been paying the people who sewed them more? Or could they have used a higher percentage of recycled or organic cotton?
I very rarely have the opposite train of thought anymore: “Why would I ever pay $69.95 when I can get them for $14.95?” or “Doesn’t that show just how overpriced jeans are!” because I know how markups are calculated and can determine a fair one. I also know how little it costs to make these goods, especially a simple pair of cotton denim pants, never mind something complex and rarer, like a cashmere sweater.
The tag is stamped Made In China. Great, people in China can make jeans just as well as people in the US, that’s a non-issue on one level. On another level, the reason Imogene + Willie charge an order of magnitude higher is partly economies of scale and partly labor.
The person sewing my Levi’s in China and the local TN working upstairs at I+W may both make a great pair of jeans, but in China that skill gets paid $0.75/hour and in Tennessee the minimum wage is now $7.25. Speaking of orders of magnitude.
Important point, and I want to be clear on this: Both are fair wages. Number of dollars required to live a middle class life in urban China, while not minuscule, is not nearly what it is to live the same lifestyle in Nashville, TN. Why? Comparative growth of the two local economies. There’s a whole other ball of wax about devaluation of China’s currency, which helps maintain that difference in cost of living and therefore wages, but that’s for another time. Suffice to say, they require less money to do the same work.
But that won’t always be the case, and even if somehow it does remain the case for the foreseeable future, there’s no virtue (and quite possible some great problems) in letting that low-wage logic strip the US of all it’s garment manufacturing. And yet, when it seems that even the average worker in TN couldn’t afford a pair of the jeans they’d be making ($7.25/hr, no way any time soon; $15/hr, now we’re talking about the ability to save up over,say, 6 months for a pair of I+W’s – assuming you don’t have kids, student loans, or any other sizable debt), it does beg the same question over and over again: how to keep manufacturing here and still make goods that serve more than the luxury market?
Which backs us into the really big question: does it really matter if there are “classes” of things, and is the perceived quality difference between those classes drastically different?
The person working at the Levi’s store where I got my pair is part of the target audience for the very product they sell. Moderately priced and decent quality with classic American style. Not junk, but nothing you’ll be freaked out about if it rips, stains, or needs to be replaced. The person who owns that store or designed those jeans or manages the office where those jeans are designed? Those people are able to afford what is perceived as a whole different level of quality, and they are, in fact, not really their own company’s key audience (though Levi’s may certainly reach out to those higher-earners with special collections at times.)
But when those high-earners pay more for what is supposed to be a better fitting, better-looking pair of pants, are they really getting what they paid for? The last time I bought a really expensive pair of jeans (which to be fair at less than $200 was still only moderately expensive by 2010 standards) they lasted a matter of months before the seat and knees ripped due to normal wear. I didn’t do yard work in these, nor did they rip at the seams. The styling and construction were great – the fabric was cheesecloth. It was hard to tell this by trying them on, and they were not marketed as “lightweight” or “casual” or anything like that. Normal jeans, normal wear, busted within 12 weeks.
I am betting dollars to donuts I get more than 12 weeks out of these Levi’s. I am also betting that if I had bought the Jean Shop or Imogene + Willie jeans, they would also not have steered me wrong.
My challenge is to understand the world I’m living in and all the pluses and minuses of these different manufacturing and selling paradigms. It’s also my job, as a designer and manufacturer, to find a way to offer a product whose quality I am sure of at a price that is fair and based in material reality and allows me to continue to make those items at that quality for that price – for a living.
I can mark anything up if it’s marketed correctly, and I agree that branding is key. But it seems an unstable proposition to either make an item unthoughtfully, sell it at a low price in high volume to make up the margin, and then market it as being premium, or to flip that coin and pay more than you have to in order to design and produce an item that is only a marginal distance in terms of style and quality from its mass-produced counterpart. And then of course the latter item has to be marketed with even more romance to get people to “buy-in” emotionally to the higher price tag.
A great book which I am hoping will give me some ideas to chew on, and maybe even some clarity on the issue, is Fugitive Denim. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a few months now, and I’ve had the clipping from WWD from back when it came out on my fridge for a year before that. But I am hoping to get to this sooner now rather than later. If you’ve read it and have feedback on the book or the whole denim topic, please let me know in the comments.
