I'm not into fashion; I just want natural fabrics in classic looks. Suppose you wanted to find 100% cotton casual pants, chinos, khakis, etc in the Western world. Could you do it?
Unfortunately, you may find this task ranging from unreasonably difficult to next-to-impossible. You see, clothing manufacturers have decided to add 2-3% elastane to nearly all skus of men's cotton pants, en masse, in a coordinated way.
Choose any brand off the top of your head and attempt to find a 100% cotton pant without any elastane. Look for the materials listing.If you do manage to find one, there's a 90% chance it will be on sale or clearence.
Apparently, this transition has been in works for some time. Yes, even for jeans.
One could argue that this is simply:
- The usual cartel-imposed fashion cycle as profit-making tool. The recent scourage of the dress shirt "spread collar" comes to mind.
- The "planned obsolecence" model applied to pants as elastane tends to degrade quickly, ruining the drape and cut of the pants
- A billion-dollar deal cut with the synthetics industry by fashion cartels
However, is that what we're seeing in this case? The infiltration of 2% elastane into the men's casual pants category is almost TOTAL. It's bizarre. It's not that these brands are carrying blended fabric "flex" pants alongside the cotton fabrics or even just giving them priority. The cotton pants are GONE. You can't buy them.
To speculate, this operation doesn't have the appearence to me of being just about profits this time. Consider the woven elastane as the vehicle for a beacon, repeater, or payload.
If elastane is a monopolized commodity, then a whole variety of nanotech can be silently blended into the raw product while guarenteeing that it receives whole-market penetration. Thousands of manufactures worldwide then buy elastane thread from this monopoly and weave the product into their clothes under the auspice of "added comfort", distrubuting nanotech into billions of articles of clothing. A trojan horse having direct contact with the bodies of hundreds of millions of men.
Think...
- Long-term contact with skin
- Designed to "ping",
- Designed to degrade, release, shed
Think...
- Mass bio-surveilance, track and trace
- Unique RFIDs embedded in fabric, wearer and location metadata
- IoT and "wearables"
- Delivery of synth-bio fibers
Good for them. As for jeans, I do not really care, is it a "true real Wrangler" or something else. Those you could find on Ebay are pretty good for me and have "made in Mexico" on the labels. If they counterfeit I don't care, as soon as they are more than good enough for their price. Same with China tools and electronics, India paints or Russian wood products, steel stocks or construction concrete mixtures and chemistry. I couldn't care less about licenses, patents or IP rights and all that stuff.
Interesting, that most jeans for European market made in Turkey and Asia, but looks like they have kind of Turkish/Asian patterns, and for whatever reason Mexican/US ones fits better for Russians, and as far as I know other Europeans. Also, Wrangler have different models for European market, you will not find that cowboy, carpenter or classic models that they have on US site. So Mexicans making cheap US-type Wrangler jeans or copying them doing a great deal.