It's not just you. Things aren't made the way they used to be. And if you've noticed that the new sofa doesn't feel as solid as your grandmother's, or the sweater you bought last fall already looks tired after twelve washes, you're not being precious about it. You're right.

Growing up, furniture felt permanent. Pieces stayed in a home for decades, sometimes generations. A dining table, a chest of drawers, a good armchair. These things were bought once and kept. My grandmother's brass candlesticks are still in my house. Her sewing machine still works. The wool coat she wore in the seventies still has its shape. None of that feels accidental to me anymore. It feels like the result of a completely different relationship between makers and materials.

What happened since then is a story about speed, and about a decision that got made quietly, over decades, across industry after industry: optimize for the price on the tag rather than the value over time.

In furniture, it started with the widespread adoption of particleboard and MDF in the 1980s and 90s. These materials are cheaper to produce, faster to assemble, and easier to ship flat. They also absorb moisture, sag under weight, can't be refinished, and don't survive a move intact. The furniture you buy today at most major retailers is not designed to last ten years. It's designed to look good in a showroom and cost less than solid wood. That's the whole calculation.

Clothing followed the same arc, just faster. The rise of fast fashion in the early 2000s compressed production cycles from seasons to weeks. Designs move from runway to rack in days. Garments are made from synthetic blends that pill, fade and lose their shape quickly, because the expectation is that you won't keep them long enough for it to matter.

The average piece of clothing is worn significantly fewer times today than it was fifteen years ago. We own more than ever, spend more collectively on clothing than ever, and yet the average quality of what's in our closets has declined steadily. The math is brutal once you see it. A thirty-dollar shirt that lasts one season and gets replaced is not cheaper than a hundred-dollar shirt that lasts a decade. It's three times more expensive, and it leaves a pile of dead shirts behind it.

And through all of this, the thinning of materials, the shortening of lifespans, the quiet swap of the appearance of quality for the real thing, prices have not gone down. They've gone up. The particleboard sofa costs what a solid wood sofa cost a generation ago. The polyester blazer costs what a wool blazer cost. You're paying the same price for a fraction of the thing.

I think about this constantly, because it's the entire reason loom exists.

I didn't start buying and selling vintage because I thought it was charming or nostalgic. I started because I kept noticing the gap between old things and new things when they sat next to each other. The weight of a brass candlestick versus a new one from a home goods chain. The hand of a wool blazer from the 1970s versus something labeled wool today with a 30% synthetic blend. The solidity of a side table built from real walnut versus one that looks identical in a photograph but wobbles when you set a glass on it.

The old things are just better. Not always. There's plenty of vintage that's worn out or badly made. But the good stuff that has survived to reach us has done so because it was built to survive. That's a kind of quality proof that nothing new can replicate. A piece of furniture that's fifty years old and still solid has already passed a test that no new piece has taken yet.

There's also something that doesn't show up in any statistic, which is the way a room feels when it contains things made with actual care. The texture of hand-thrown pottery. The warmth of unlacquered brass developing its own patina. The weight of a glass that was blown rather than molded. These things register in your hands, in the corner of your eye, in how a room feels at the end of a long day. They're not luxuries. They're just the difference between things you have a relationship with and things you don't.

I'm not arguing that everyone should furnish a house from scratch with vintage, or that new things are always worse. I'm arguing that the default has shifted in a way most of us haven't reckoned with, and that once you see it you can't unsee it. Choosing better doesn't mean spending more. It usually means buying less, more slowly, with more thought. One solid piece instead of three mediocre ones. That's why everything I bring into loom has to earn its place. Not because it's old, but because it's good.