$300 for a pair of overalls style pants??!! Three. Hundred. Dollars. Not custom fit or tailored. No ornamentation or out-of the ordinary assembly process required. Looks like an experienced seamstress could knock it out in a few hours with a decent template pattern and $30 worth of fabric.
...got to be kidding...
I think you have a flawed understanding of what's involved... Hopefully they have the machined dies to punch-cut all the pieces they want to make in a given size in one go. That saves a lot of cutting time. But the pieces still need to be pinned and sewn. A single pair of those high-waisters would take more than an hour just to sew, never mind the steps up to that point. And quality fabric of the sort they had woven for these tends to run at least $30
a yard, and those pants will take a couple. And, most importantly,
they have to factor in the egregious chunk Disney and Lucasfilm take. If they don't want to operate at a loss, that has to get factored in somewhere.
I am all in favor of supporting American businesses, in America, employing Americans, making quality product in non-sweatshop conditions. This is the price I expect from anyplace decent paying their employees decently and committed to quality product. Heck, this is about how much Indy Magnoli's Star Wars pants run in "off-the-rack" sizing. Denuo Novo, and Anovos before them, make use of payment-plan services, which makes stuff like this more accessible to people who cannot, in fact, drop that much in one go, or justify it to themselves. For instance, I just spent almost a thousand dollars on Hachette's 1:350 scale
Andromeda model kit. It's over four feet long and the hull is largely dis-cast metal. I could never have done that if it weren't broken up into sixty weekly issues of about fifteen bucks each. This is also how I got all my Anovos stuff.
I will poke a toe into the minefield and hope it doesn't get blown off, but this is what happens when wages don't keep up with inflation. The price is actually quite realistic and reasonable for what it is and what went into it. We, as a country, though, have gotten used to being underpaid ourselves and having access to cheap -- in every sense of the word -- goods made in places that pay their workers a couple dollars a day, if they're lucky, so they can charge far less and get our business. If you were getting the roughly thousand dollars a week minimum that would be the average in America if wages had kept up with inflation since the 1940s, this would be a sepcial-occasion luxury, sure, but an eminently affordable one.
I'm hopefully going to get at least the jacket. I've wanted one since 1980. I want to support Denuo Novo and, as someone working on my apparel-design degree, I understand why it costs what it does and don't have a problem with it. I am being the change I want to see in the world.
www.therpf.com
