Elastics are broken down by UV (sunlight), hot water, detergents, fabric softeners, dryer sheets, intense heat (dryers), and use. So if you wear stretchy jeans outdoors on a regular basis, and wash them in a washing machine regularly, they won't last long. So it's a conspiracy by the clothing industry to get us to buy more pants. ;)Stretchy materials are inherently weaker, and their integration with any other non-stretchy material will diminish the lifespan of the garment made from that textile. Especially at the seams.
I get the tongue-in-cheek nature of your comment, but there is more interesting stuff to unpack here. Up until the 50's, people had Clothes. They wore clothing. They went out, bought things that lasted, and wore it - and repaired it or handed it down - until it no longer functioned as clothing, and was turned into rags. Think Levi's. There was everyday wear, formal wear, and high-fashion. Then one designer - can't remember who it was, but someone whose name you'd recognize, like Chanel - introduced the idea of Seasonal Lines. Now you suddenly needed FOUR TIMES the amount of clothing you had before! And remember, this is post-WWII America, where industry is booming, and factories are making shit, and the economy is going crazy, and the Suburbs are invented and Shopping Malls are invented. So now you have NEW STUFF YOU HAVE TO BUY, with your NEW MONEY, when your drive your NEW CAR, to the new - air conditioned! - SHOPPING MALL... That was Phase One of the change in clothing worldwide. Phase two began when you needed someone who bought last year's spring fashions, to shell out more money THIS year, because now you had this factory and employees and pensions and OSHA and Insurance and 40-hour workweeks, to support. And there was all this oil we made for the War Effort, and it was still coming out of the ground, so the government funded DuPont and others to invent new things to do with this oil. And stretch materials were invented. And water-repellent materials. And materials that didn't need ironing. Etc. So you had the seasonality of a garment, then you made it with less resilient materials. The final step was to cut prices so EVERYONE could afford "fashion". And you did that by moving production overseas, and reducing the resiliency of the design to cut down on costs - material cost, material use, construction time, etc. - which also reduced the lifespan of the product. So now you have bespoke jeans. Now you have niche manufacturers literally using 150-year old machinery - that still works great, thankyouverymuch - buying quality materials (selvedge denim), and using the sewing techniques used early last century that created the ruggedness of an original pair of Levi's, etc. Full circle, man.
I feel like Fast Fashion took everything you just described, put a brick on the accelerator, and pointed the car to the nearest cliff. On the subject of flexible jeans, is that I find them to feel so cheap, but I went to the fancy mall the other week to kill some time and I'm even seeing them in the "high end" stores going for a couple hundred bucks and they actually seem worse than what I've seen in places like Target or Kohls. Also, what brands do you recommend for durable, sustainable, ethical clothes? I know of a few, like Everlane and Bluer Denim, but not much other than them.