Cost of clothing in Low-Tech Loadouts

[Donny Brook]

I apologize if this has been discussed before.

I am looking through Loadouts: Low-tech Armor and I am struck by how costly the regular clothing items listed tend to be. How is it that a regular pair of trousers or a basic tunic can be in the hundreds of dollars?

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Status. See p. 3:

Many of these loadouts assume that the fighter has a “knightly” social status and so the price of his clothing is calculated using the cost of living of someone with at least Status 2.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

I apologize if this has been discussed before.

I am looking through Loadouts: Low-tech Armor and I am struck by how costly the regular clothing items listed tend to be. How is it that a regular pair of trousers or a basic tunic can be in the hundreds of dollars?

Clothes used to be very expensive. Most people would wear patched hand-me-downs.

[The Colonel]

The Hodges list:
http://web.archive.org/web/201106282...ces.html#CLOTH AND CLOTHING

Gives some indicative prices - compare to the wages at the bottom to see that even the "landless serf's tunics" cited are priced at a day's pay or so...

[whswhs]

From the history I've read, it sounds as if the cost of clothing used to be really high. Before the spinning wheel was invented, it took five months to spin enough fiber for one suit of adult cloths, and another month to weave the yarn into fabric. After that, the fabric was cut in ways that minimized wastage (it was expensive!) and that limited the cuts of clothing. So figure an ordinary household could provide one new outfit for each adult member per year, at best. This improved with the invention of the spinning wheel, which could produce the same amount of fiber in one month—but it was still not cheap.

Look at the literature of the period. You see even noblewomen spending a lot of their time spinning and weaving, from the ancient world up to Sleeping Beauty. That wasn't recreation; it was economic necessity.

Megan McArdle had a column a few years ago where she pointed out how few clothes people owned between the World Wars. And that was with the aid of industrial technology!

[Anders]

There's a Swedish proverb for something really expensive: "It will cost you your shirt."

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

I apologize if this has been discussed before.

I am looking through Loadouts: Low-tech Armor and I am struck by how costly the regular clothing items listed tend to be. How is it that a regular pair of trousers or a basic tunic can be in the hundreds of dollars?

Before the Industrial Revolution thread and cloth required so much labour to make that they were were eye-wateringly costly. Look over any brief history of industrialisation and see how many of the transformative breakthroughs involved ginning, scouring, carding, spinning, weaving, and fulling. Then there is making: before the invention of the third-world sweatshop it was common for a working man to own only one or two pairs of trousers. Sunday Best was a luxury.

Nowadays we are used to a price for clothes in relation to wages that is, historically speaking, fantastically cheap

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

Status. See p. 3:

Well, that is a truly regrettable design choice.
Firstly, there is not a clear indication which loadouts are subject to this premium. Also for some reason it doesn't seem to have been applied to footwear. Finally, it yields some inconsistent results. For example, Qin cavalry and charioteers have statistically equivalent tunics, but one costs $98 and the other $468, but their statistically identical helmets have the same price to each other.



P.S. To posters who have replied referencing historical clothing production, I apologize for not being clear that my question relates to the internal economics of GURPS rules.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

P.S. To posters who have replied referencing historical clothing production, I apologize for not being clear that my question relates to the internal economics of GURPS rules.

The internal economics of GURPS rules stink on ice. The thing with wealth, income, TL, status, cost-of-living, adventure gear, settled lifestyles, and rank affecting status is a thorny tangle, and the decision to have relative prices unaffected by technological change is an irrecoverable disaster.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Sunday Best was a luxury.

My understanding is that 'Sunday best' generally meant your newest set of clothes. They weren't of a different, more formal style, just newer. If you were well-off you might have enough sets that your 'best' was only used for church and a few other important functions until your worst set wore out and you got a new 'best' and your old 'best' just became your least worn day-to-day clothes. Everyone else, well they just hoped nothing horrible happened to their better set of clothes.

One reason for the shift from linen to cotton was that mechanising the harvesting and processing of cotton proved much easier than doing the same to linen.