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AEVL | 3 months ago

Just some trivia (and an aside):

The collaboration is with Issey Miyake. Steve Jobs black turtlenecks was Issey Miyakes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2022/08/10/heres-...

(As an aside, I swear by pants from the Issey Miyake Homme Plissé collection. Since investing in some pairs about 10 years ago, I have hardly worn anything else—no other pants match their comfort. The iPhone Pocket is of course ridiculous anyway.)

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nathan_compton|3 months ago

The pants cost around 500 bucks? I don't necessarily believe that a priori spending $500 on a pair of pants is irrational, but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money unless they are lined with gold or something.

I usually buy cheap clothes and mend them and ten years for a pair of pants isn't unusual for me. I probably haven't spent $500 dollars on clothes in a year ever in my entire life (except maybe the year I bought a suit for getting married).

I guess I'm just genuinely curious how you found yourself in the position of even contemplating $500 for pants.

walletdrainer|3 months ago

> but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money unless they are lined with gold or something.

It depends on how much you earn. I don’t mind spending tens of thousands on Loro Piana cashmere because it’s really nice, but at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial.

Keep in mind that HN is packed with people with salaries above $1M/yr and entrepreneurs with way higher income levels.

A few years ago I too would’ve considered $500 for pants to be absurd, at this point I just go to a tailor and pay slightly more than that but save tons of time in the long term and always have perfect fitting pants. The time savings alone are tremendous, after getting a pair fitted properly I can just order new ones whenever I need without having to spend hours going through shops looking for the right pair of pants.

umpalumpaaa|3 months ago

I never knew what a difference good pants can make. I usually just bought my pants from H&M/other retailers or Amazon. I usually bought what I considered good value pants for like $30-80. I then, out of curiosity, bought pants that were 2-4 times as expensive (~$150) and it really made a difference. I never really liked the pants I had… they never fit right… they felt very uncomfortable. The new pants I got about 2 years ago (the more expensive ones) were very very different. Very comfy. They also had a lot of nice features that I never knew I needed but that I now want by default…

- A button that just "clicks". Most pants I usually owned had a traditional pants button. Those more expensive ones had buttons that just "clicked". Away goes the worry about a button falling off while you are on the go. - Pockets with hidden zippers: My pants have pockets and in those pockets are smaller pockets with a zipper. Perfect to store things that are small and easily lost.

There are more "features" but those are the important ones. The most important feature is just the material that is used. I barely feel it. Also the company that makes those pants makes other things as well. I ordered a lot of cloths by now and the amazing thing is that everything they make fits me perfectly. I don't know how they do it… When I usually buy pants I have to try on like 10 pants to find one that fits. Even if I pick the "correct" size.

nluken|3 months ago

Different strokes for different folks. I'm a fashion lover but a fan of cheap cars, and I could equally say something similar about people who drive new luxury cars when there's plenty of reliable functionality to be had under $10k. There's a lot of craftsmanship that goes into nice clothes, and you can get way more expensive than $500. And fashion is a form of art in a way. What makes a painting worth thousands of dollars?

kulahan|3 months ago

$500 for something you might wear for a decade straight? A brand-new pair of Levis at JC Penny is gonna run you like $90 anyways. It's not that much more expensive.

But also, quality has diminishing returns in basically every category. At the low end, it's extremely efficient to improve the quality of your product and charge a bit more. At the high end, you can't make any more inexpensive moves to set yourself apart, so you use higher end materials, fabrication methods, and workers.

onion2k|3 months ago

I don't necessarily believe that a priori spending $500 on a pair of pants is irrational, but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money unless they are lined with gold or something.

I don't think Steve Jobs went shopping for pants. Nor do many of the people who buy this sort of garment. They either have an assistant who buys things for them, whose goal is to keep them happy and not blow a predetermined budget, or they go to a store and sit in a nice suite where a personal shopper suggests things to them. In either scenario the price of individual items probably don't even get a mention.

baggachipz|3 months ago

I believe the word for it is "rich".

mmooss|3 months ago

They save you from buying 10 pairs at $100. They not only are durable, including not fraying, etc., but keep their form and color, and they have a beautiful form and color to begin with. You get what you pay for (if you buy the right $500 pants).

Someone outside IT might say, why pay for a Macbook when you can buy a $100 Chromebook? Why use Vim or Emacs when you can use Notepad/TextEdit (though those all cost the same!).

ricochet11|3 months ago

I once paid $1000 for some sneakers. I’m still regularly wearing them 7 years later. I’ve bought $50/$100 and they never last that long. It was an insane purchase at the time, done in a moment of jet lagged madness when my shoes fell apart in an airport. But over time it’s turned out to be a great investment. Smart, comfortable, well made.

reaperducer|3 months ago

I don't necessarily believe that a priori spending $500 on a pair of pants is irrational, but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money

Maybe he's amortizing them.

He says they've lasted ten years, so that's $50/year.

If they last another ten, that's $25/year.

Oh, great. Now I've invented Pants-as-a-Service.

NaomiLehman|3 months ago

decent hand-sewn raw denim made in the EU/US jeans are minimum $500. and i'm talking non-designer. just fair wages and good materials.

flyinglizard|3 months ago

Don't rule out until you've tried it. High end clothing (not just brand name, but real advanced stuff) is pretty amazing in how it makes you feel. I'm inclined to spend on anything I interact with, and clothes is pretty big interaction.

cael450|3 months ago

Yeah, that is wild. I can't imagine spending that kind of money on pants.

iamacyborg|3 months ago

Pro-tip. You can buy them used for a significant discount to rrp.

I_dream_of_Geni|3 months ago

Gee... And I thought $5 spent at Starbucks was outrageous...

cons0le|3 months ago

statistically, inheritance

thrw045|3 months ago

This is kind of getting into the weeds a little bit but for me and a lot of others luxury items can be fun to own. You can get an affinity for certain designers style, whether it's Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Balenciaga. The items are ridiculously expensive sometimes but it's kind of a tough line to balance because the fact that they cost so much make them more special. So how cheap should they be before they don't feel as special anymore? Is it all a bit irrational? I guess. There isn't a clear definitive defense for luxury items I think other than the feeling they can give. Some people can spend all their income on luxury items rather than other discretionary items because it's the most fun to them.

silisili|3 months ago

I always liked this story because they seemed to connect person to person.

Sadly, Jobs died in 2011, and Miyake in 2022.

I guess you could call this a small homage, but it feels different in that their founders are gone and it's just corp to corp dealings now.

thevillagechief|3 months ago

I got excited until I saw they cost $600? Once in a while I'm reminded we exist in very different universes. Still trying to justify splurging on common projects 2 years later.

sincerely|3 months ago

in my experience as a tech guy who got into fashion and then after several years went back to not caring: Sneakers are the product category with the least differentiation in value-for-money between the high end (especially designer, but also not-designer-but-still-expensive like common projects) both in terms of aesthetics and quality/durability. You're paying $300 more for a 10% better product. Jeans, outerwear, knits, boots, you can more easily justify that cost

booleanbetrayal|3 months ago

I am wondering what you call consumption that feeds $499 designer margins on polyester like that, while so many people can barely afford to scrape by day to day.

shermantanktop|3 months ago

Income inequality is a phrase that pathologizes what appears to be a universal truth. In all types of economic and political systems (after we left the forest, and probably while we were still in the forest), some people have been desperately poor while other people are not. What would be interesting is a single counterexample of sustained "income equality."

That said, our current degree of inequality and the particular way it is distributed seems to be unusual and remarkable. But pointing to someone having a hard time is, IMO, not a critique of that.

sunnyps|3 months ago

Have you tried Costco pants? They're pretty good.

qwerpy|3 months ago

I had a coworker who lost a lot of weight and showed up at work one day wearing new clothes and looking sharp. The pants were from Costco. I have since gone and bought a few pairs of pants from them. They feel fairly high quality, made of sturdy and comfortable materials, and are wife-approved. And of course they are very inexpensive.

I'm sure expensive pants have their benefits but no matter how much money I have, I will always baby expensive things, and it's very inconvenient to baby clothes (e.g. must be dry cleaned, can't use a washer or dryer, can't risk getting stains on it). There are good reasons why dads gets their clothes from Costco.

iamacyborg|3 months ago

Big fan of the Homme Plisse stuff but I do wish it wasn’t polyester.

It is a nice way to wear essentially a fancy pair of joggers while people assume you’re being somewhat smart though.

crossroadsguy|3 months ago

I will look suspiciously at my Le Sel bottle after this collab.

butlike|3 months ago

The brushstroke pants look really attractive

victor22|3 months ago

Who cares, Steve would have hated to sell a sock for $200, really makes you think how much they pay the chinese for the iphone

tacker2000|3 months ago

Sorry but 500 eur for polyester pants? Not even cotton?

OJFord|3 months ago

You misunderstand, it's 20EUR for the trousers; 480 for the name printed on them. (And why you even want a name/logo printed on them...)

m463|3 months ago

I looked it up, and Issey Mikaye seems to have died in 2022.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issey_Miyake

I wonder

... would jobs have approved?

... would issey miyake have approved?

bborud|3 months ago

I'm pretty confident the answer on both counts would be "no".

(This teminds me of a show I once saw where various design students were given the task to design things. Philippe Starck was the judge. One of the students made a iPhone cover and Starck almost blew a gasket. I don't remember exactly what he said when he saw it. But he pointed out that the iPhone itself was a beautiful design so defacing it with an ugly piece of plastic was just a horrific waste of resources.

He also said something about objects having to deserve to exist -- though that was probably in a talk he gave at some point. Where he pointed out that his famous Alessi sitrus press was a good example of a pointless object that shouldn't exist. At least it looked good, but it was a pretty poor sitrus press).