When it comes to clothes, I live at the “low cost/low time/low quality” end of the pareto frontier. But the bay area had a sudden attack of weather this December, and the cheap sweaters on Amazon get that way by being made of single-ply toilet paper. It became clear I would need to spend actual money to stay warm, but spending money would not be sufficient without knowledge.

I used to trade money for time by buying at thrift stores. Unfortunately the efficient market has come for clothing, in the form of resellers who stalk Goodwill and remove everything priced below the pareto frontier to resell online, where you can’t try them on before buying. Goodwill has also gotten better about assessing their prices, and will no longer treat new cashmere and ratty fleece as the same category.

But the market has only become efficient in the sense of removing easy bargains. It is still trivial to pay a lot of money for shitty clothes. So I turned to reddit and shoggoths, to learn about clothing quality and where the bargains are. This is what I learned. It's from the POV of a woman buying [...]

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Outline:

(01:18) General money saving tricks

(02:25) Discounters

(03:47) Online Thrift

(05:08) Quality

(06:44) Brands

(07:23) Wool facts

(08:25) Other tips

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First published:
January 26th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YFqRrmbuB5sJvnFyu/things-i-learned-from-reddit-fashion

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Things I learned from reddit fashion” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma)