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Testing the hypothesis would be somewhat hard and require a lot of time. I'm not even talking about the 1950's, my opinion is based on the 80's. Our family in America would send us packages with clothes and whatever else might be useful that they could grab on a sale. These clothes would then make the following rounds: my oldest cousin -> my older brother -> my younger cousin -> me -> my youngest cousin -> my mother, for some of the clothes that looked ok on her -> rag for cleaning floors, where they would serve faithfully for many years, and survive in a state that, if push came to shove, you could still throw into a washing machine and wear them.
If something approaching this quality is still available, please send me a link.
For food, I'm not talking about America, I'm talking about eastern Europe. "Premium organic" food does not approach the quality of what was available back when I was a kid, and the fact that I'd have to go and find a goddamn farmer's market to get what was right there in the local grocery store is itself a drop in quality of life. Again - hard to disentangle - maybe it's all the BS European regulations that are slowly killing farmers throughout the continent, and not free trade, but don't tell me there was nothing lost.
I've got T-shirts from the 20th century. My jeans don't last as long as they used to (I think because they no longer make them with rivets on the back, which is both a matter of cost and damage to furniture -- jeans used to be outdoor/work clothes only and the rivets were a remnant of that, and the way they fail now is they fail at the back pocket stitching), but they still last several years of daily use. I buy a lot of polo shirts (mostly Nautica brand -- actually usually their cheaper "outlet" off-brand), and while they do get stretched out in places and shrink in others over a couple of years, they're still quite usable when I throw them out for being too ratty-looking.
Women's clothes seem a lot less durable, but that's always been true.
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Even my Uniqlo t-shirts last for 10 years. Unless you buy on temu or something, the clothing durability crisis is way overstated in my view.
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Especially younger kids grow rapidly and don't wear clothes enough to wear out before they out grow them. We've got hand me downs that have been through 5 kids and are little worse for the wear.
Fully agree about the supermarket supply chain selecting for lower quality but more durable food, especially produce.
Like I said, my mother ended up wearing some of them for years as well. Clothes from nowadays seem to have built-in lifetime of 1-2 years.
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