This isn't progress.

Increasingly, I'm seeing it as yet another form of market manipulation to try to squeeze ever so much more money out of citizen's wallets.

Used to be I could identify a brand or style of clothing, find items which fit, and return reliably to the same vendor repeatedly. This was my habit in my teens, it remains my preferred mode in my 40s. And while I'm rarely accused of being highly fashion conscious, I'm also not a slob (it really doesn't take much to have a sense of style).

The first time I encountered a wholesale change in fashion was when the Gap discontinued a line of jeans in the late 1980s. Being naturally gifted with large thighs, an aviator cut worked exceptionally well for me (and yes, I also miss parachute pants and Zoot Suits, thanks for asking).

After a bit of casting around, I turned up another store which carried a consistent cut of jeans and wore those through the 1990s and most of the 2000s. For casual office wear, I'd discovered a few department and men's clothing stores which carried reliable fits.

I had a line of black t-shirts with a nice cotton fabric and a subtly off-black color which became a fave. Much as Steve Jobs bought a lifetime supply of black mock-turtlenecks, I'd found my shirt for life (but failed to secure a lifetime supply of them at the time, an error in judgment).

Pretty much all of that came to a crashing end in 2010. Numerous vendors changed their sizes -- same brand and size which had previously fit (as evidenced by what was in my wardrobe) now didn't, and in ridiculous fashion. Virtually everything suddenly went "skinny", which is to say, less fabric, and fabrics became very noticeably cheaper.

I first discovered this on one of my grab-and-dash shopping visits: walk into store, pick up a few pair of jeans and shirts of proven reliable fit, pay, head home (I'm pretty much the antithesis of a recreational shopper, malls are torture palaces).

Pulling on the new duds for work the next morning I discovered I couldn't breath. Everything felt 2-3 sizes too small. I double-checked sizes, they corresponded with what I'd bought in the past, pulled existing clothes out of the closet, and returned to the store with my purchases for a full refund as they no longer produced items which fit me.

It took over a dozen stops to find jeans and shirts which fit.

And given the "fast fashion" fad, I've got absolutely no assurance that I'll be able to rely on those vendors in future.

Oh, and for those of you suggesting online shopping: SRSLY? For clothes, which you wear next to your skin, for which fit, cut, finish, and feel are absolutely crucial? Thanks, but no. Worse, with present levels of quality control (and I suspect: highly variable producer sourcing), it's not even sufficient to find a style which fits and order a count of those: you've got to individually try on and examine every last damned item.

The result is I've gone from being a reliable customer happy to return to a store repeatedly to one who treats every encounter as a hostile and frustrating experience for which I'm not likely to achieve anything remotely resembling satisfaction.

I've considered custom tailoring, though I've not gone that route yet, for shirts and slacks. Though as I mostly wear t-shirts and jeans, the additional cost is tremendous. It's actually not so bad for some tailors I've explored, though the one I'd earmarked for future items appears to have gone out of business, and of course, I'd have needed to first see what they'd produce (with ~6 weeks turnaround) rather than simply buying something off the rack and having it altered (which has worked in the past).

What I don't understand is why with all the supposed advances in personalization, there isn't an affordable and readily accessible, brick-and-mortar service by which people can specify the clothes they want, have measurements taken, and receive (with a satisfaction guarantee) clothes which actually fit. There've been some noises about this in past, and there are "made to measure" (which is not the same as bespoke) "pop-up" tailors such as Indochino -- the one time I'd found them in real life it was an absolute zoo with ~60 minute wait simply to get into the storefront for measurement.

I'm not sure this is "ripe for disruption", but it's certainly rife with disappointment.