What makes clothes durable?

I'm running short of knickers again. It seems to me they last less and less time before they become the ones you don't wear out in case you fall under a bus and the doctors see your holey knickers.....
I've worked out that the one's that seems to have gone particularly quickly are those that are knitted cotton with "5% elastane" I'm not sure whether elastane is a natural rubber or synthetic material to add stretch, but I think that this goes relatively quickly after so many washes, leaving the lower percentage of thinner cotton in the yarn which then wears out (typically for me on the front).
What I also found annoying was that in a fairly exhaustive search of knicker suppliers in Europe almost all of the ones that use organically grown cotton (my #1 prioity) also added elastane. I ended up buying a pair from exzema clothing.

They were a bit expensive with postage on top (!) but they appear to be made of fairly thick material with a real elastic threaded waistband (so you can remove it if elastic is a problem), therefore if the elastic goes I will be able to replace it with a drawstring or more elastic. I'd rather spend a little more and get 10 year knickers rather than ones that last 4 years if I'm lucky.
Any other suggestions for choosing durable clothes?

A natural fiber person I know has a 150-or-so-year-old hemp shirt that is still in perfect condition. It isn’t being used currently, and I’m not sure what its use history is. But hemp is certainly a strong fiber. I imagine you could make very strong clothing with two or more ply hemp or linen, but comfort would be questionable.. I also wonder about knitted versus woven garments, whether the latter (as used more often in the past) are any more durable, since knit garments can unravel.

Clothing seems to wear out most often where it is subject to more friction and tension, thus why jeans tend to wear out first at the knees, shoes at the heels (and my sleeves around the wrists, where I use them to pick up pots.) I wonder also whether looser clothing is by nature more durable, since it has more room to shift and extend rather than straining the fabric.

Hi Nancy,

Thanks for the post. My wife has extra sensitive skin.

I'm really watching label for "elastame" and its clones. My son got some T-shirts with it in, and they deformed and look terrible.

I'm on the small side. There are a couple of good brands of t-shirts with quite heavy, 100% cotton which a friend often buys. If she gets a stain on them, they get passed to me, and I used old underwear to make a pattern from, and now I sew my own knickers. So far they seem to be lasting well and are *very* comfortable.

If I'm at the fabric shop at any point, I'll look for heavy jersey there as well, but I don't get out that way very often. The long-sleeved cowl neck shirts I bought in the Christmas sales were 100% cotton, but the cotton isn't anywhere near as heavy weight as some old ones we bought 20 years ago. But some of my oldest ones were getting pretty thin from age, so I did the best I could.

Short answer: quality fabric is a big part of making clothes "durable". The thicker the cotton jersey, the longer the item will last.