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Indeed and clothes circa a hundred years ago were as expensive as cars today. Working professionals used to spend a significant portion of their yearly income on a meager set of clothing.
Likely depends on the clothing, I don't know if it's that bad but yeah apparel was like 14% of the household budget back in 1901.
Actually considering that the standard recommendation for a car payment is about 10%, if we don't include gas or other costs and just the vehicle alone then cars are actually cheaper than clothes were back then relative to budgets. Of course plenty of people go over that recommendation but still a great showcase of how expensive labor intensive work like that was and how much poorer we were in general. And that's of course still ~100 years after the sewing machine, I can only imagine it must have been even greater before that.
And even more so because it was so expensive, they had less outfits than we do now as well. Double whammy! Way more expensive for a lot less.
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