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"Major Upgrade" for the fast, disposable fashion crowd.

Major downgrade for maintainability and ability to repair.

This "upgraded" zipper will be impossible to replace if broken at home, by hand or with a machine, or even at a typical professional repair shop. YKK documents say a "dedicated AiryString® sewing machine" is required.[1]

[1]https://ykkdigitalshowroom.com/assets/AiryString_202507_en.p...

6 comments

Fabrics have gotten a lot thinner, and thus develop holes a lot more quickly.

I have t-shirts from 2010 which are faded but have 0 holes. Whereas t-shirts I bought half a year ago have holes in them.

Also, you mentioning the inability to repair stuff at home makes me sad. My mom, 72 year old, repaired my nephew's jacket the other day. Brand new zipper.

The machine in that PDF you shared makes me feel YKK is going in the direction of Apple. They supply the parts and the manufacturing device.

You do something they don't like? Sewing machine turns off.

Yes. Also at the above link:

"All AiryString® part sales and leasing of dedicated sewing machines are conducted between YKK and the customer. YKK will also coordinate the installation and startup of sewing machines at garment manufacturing factories. For more information on leasing dedicated sewing machines, please contact your YKK representative"

> I have t-shirts from 2010 which are faded but have 0 holes. Whereas t-shirts I bought half a year ago have holes in them.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Survivor...

Yes, survivorship bias is real, but it's absolutely true that clothes are often made of more delicate fabrics today.

Some of it is fashion-motivated; a shaved leather jacket that has a feel almost like cloth lays very differently on a person than a bomber- or motorcycle-weight jacket.

The rest is because lighter threads are cheaper. And lighter-weight zippers are cheaper.

We won't know if this self-lauded new product is an improvement or not for a while.

Why the downvotes? This comment is pretty spot on.

I've never had a shirt fall apart so bad it didn't make it back home.

I know, probably the parties I go to are just that boring.

The comment means "you throw away the shirts with holes, so obviously any shirt you have from 2010 has no holes". Unless every single new shirt the GP has has holes in it (which they don't), we can't draw any conclusions from this, except "some shirts from any year last a long time and some don't".

There is no comment, just a link to an image file.

Check out the URL.

> I have t-shirts from 2010 which are faded but have 0 holes. Whereas t-shirts I bought half a year ago have holes in them.

One of the little things I find most satisfying about getting old is hearing the same proclamations about quality going to shit today that I heard when I was much younger, only now the supposedly-good baseline of the comparison happened well after the complaints I grew up hearing. I, too, want everyone to get the hell off my lawn.

Some of it is very real, and economical.

If your mother has to drop-spindle the flax your father helped gather from the retting pond to make the thread to weave the garment... that tunic better damned-well last several years. In fact, garments were mentioned in estate records of the deceased because they were so valuable.

If you can shop online for a new T-shirt while riding the bus to work, and have it delivered to your door the next day... your children aren't going to hope to inherit it.

Sadly, I have garments from my grand-parents made 40 years ago which are much better than my parents garments made 20 years ago, themselves much better than what you can find nowadays at the same price points from the same brands.

Thankfully, with the internet, it's easier than ever to buy actually nice and well made pieces of cloth. They are not cheap however.

That seems consistent with a progressive slide towards lower quality. The products that were available when I was young where dramatically lower quality than those available to my parents but are dramatically higher quality than what is available now.

The fix is easy: Don’t buy new clothes from fast fashion brands or stores.

If you only buy quality from small stores and independent designers you still get the same quality you got 15 years ago. Sure it’s 2-3 times the price but it’s worth it.

I don’t know if it’s that easy.

I have a few favourites t-shirts I rotate around. My H&M Iron Maiden t-shirt for $20 has surpassed much more expensive t-shirts by a long shot.

It also helps to avoid synthetic fabrics in my experience.

But you are right it’s not that easy…

It feels easier to me: buy second hand, look for natural fibers, take care of your garments (wash according to tag, don’t use fabric softeners or dryer sheets).

Learning to mend isn’t too bad either, especially with fabrics that are sturdier.

I don’t know how to mend at all - but I have an excellent tailor in my neighbourhood who mends stuff like jeans and shirts for me for a reasonable price. Also I love his little shop so I’m happy to pay a bit extra to support that business!

That’s awesome! I love community solutions. I recently moved out to a more rural area so places like that aren’t as walkable as my old place in the city - we had a sustainable store with refillable soaps, detergent, etc; a good half dozen hair places, a local yarn and slewing shop that doubles as a place for people in the refugee community to learn techniques and get assistance; there’s also food co-ops, community garden, etc.

It’s all been really cool to see as it grows, and while I’m sad to have moved away, it also gives me an opportunity to find and form new communities.

I try to buy my clothes from shops that sell to the trades/safety gear (e.g. brands like "Hard Yakka", although I guess that brand probably doesn't exist outside of Australasia). Most of these shops do a good line of cargo pants/shorts.

But where does one get jeans that were made of the non-stretch denim that we use to get in the 1980s? That stuff was as thick as a tarpaulin (for those of us who are younger, tarpaulins used to be made of fabric, not plastic).

Stretch denim drives me insane. Not only is it much thinner and more fragile it's also just straight up a time bomb. Given enough time the elastic just deteriorates and you get super weird wrinkles all over. Not to mention that pants that fit just fine in the morning need a belt in the afternoon because the whole thing stretches out.

>Major downgrade for maintainability and ability to repair.

But it seems the exact opposite is true. These zippers should be easily removable, leaving the fabric mostly intact. After that you can put in a normal zipper.

This looks much harder to seam-rip to me, as the stitching is going between the individual zipper teeth.

But you can just cut it off entirely, with minimal losses to the fabric, which is preferable to pulling out the seams, which will leave damaged fabric behind.

Cutting it off is even easier since one side is fabric and the other side is metal (for which you can push against).

It remains to be seen if it can be repaired by hand. A special sewing machine is required, as opposed to using a regular sewing machine. The document you linked is about garment production, not repair.

How things get repaired is not up to the original company in most cases. People are inventive when they need to be.

Almost anything that can be sewn together by a machine can be sewn together by hand too. That said, sewing doesn’t do much for most zipper failures anyway, which are usually broken teeth or sliders.

It might be more challenging but I don't see why you couldn't also sew this by hand.

> This "upgraded" zipper will be impossible to replace if broken at home, by hand or with a machine

It looks like they just replaced the tape with cord. I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to hand stitch it in, though it might need some temporary stitches to hold it in place.

Huh, reading the spec sheet, the hem line at the bottom of these has to be quite thin like the rest of the zipper-proximate area.

You can note on each of the 3 example garments and in the comment near them that the double thick sewn hem has to end near the new "zipper" design.