[EDIT: This goes for plenty of stuff that's not clothes, and with more-recent products to compare …

I don't know what the right term is but yeah it's not quite inflation. IIRC households pre-ww2 were spending 15% of their budget on clothing, and the farther back you go the higher that gets even to the point where the concept of "budget" breaks down and the entire family's activities were oriented around procuring food and cloth. Good fabric has always been and is still very expensive! We have created much cheaper alternatives but if you want the quality your predecessors had you better be prepared to look 15% of your household budget in the face. Homemade isn't even an alternative here. Most of the cost of good clothing is in the fabric and there's just no way around this.

> Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150. Of course, this is still cheaper than it was in the 1940s. With my disposable income I could afford to buy a few $150 shirts a month. A worker of my social class in the 1940s could not. I don't need the quality so I buy $5 Gildan shirts instead. I do buy Made in Canada cat toys for my little guy though. Different priorities.

This is such an important point. So much of inflation is not $THING used to cost $X and now costs $Y, but that $THING is significantly lower quality than it used to be. Quality is famously difficult to quantify (Pirsig), so it is much easier to manipulate it without people noticing. A product that looks the same, but is slightly worse, at purchase time is a lot harder to identify than the same product that costs 20% more, so businesses prefer it. That happens incrementally over years, until the product is a shadow of its former self.

> physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s For a supporting example from the Spring and Summer 1929 Sears Catalog at, https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-158-r-1929... "If it’s a Hercules, it’s the best work shirt on earth! Sales prove it. Deep down in the mine, in the mills and factories, high on the lofty girders of a towering skyscraper, in fact wherever the work is rugged and the going is tough you’ll find Hercules shirts on the backs of hardy men. It is the undisputed choice of a Nation! This shirt is made of heavyweight chambray in closed front style." 87 cents, postpaid. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ says that's $16.80 now. Fabric breaking strength is 62 pounds/inch. The triple stitched seams have a breaking strength of 58 pounds/inch. The fanc…

Presumably because as soon as cheap good-enough clothes became available, high quality clothes became a luxury and are priced accordingly.