I wonder how true this is. There's a lot of machine sewing, done by humans, to make more complicated articles of clothing (for example a dress, or a pair of trousers), and doubtless that won't be mechanised even though it could be because humans are cheaper to retrain. Your basic little black dress will be hand made, maybe by a person you know, maybe by near slave labour, but humans made that.
But say socks, the actual garment manufacture is entirely mechanical, thread goes in, machine works, socks come out. There are a bunch of human processes we add, including a QA step (the machine doesn't care if it makes occasional non-socks, a QA can see that's not a sock and dispose of it or summon maintenance if the machine starts to do this a lot) but so far as I can see the socks are made by the machine.
The boundary between machine and hand is fundamentally nebulous. Saying that we add human process feels like a backwards framing here. People do QA on things done by hand. People feed yarn into their own needles. The current process for knitwear manufacturing is basically the same as it was 200 years ago, but we have removed humans to the greatest extent possible. However with socks or yardage people are constantly operating on the machines. Someone needs to feed the yarn and patch it when it snaps. The boundary between hand and machine is just nebulous but every single step of the way has human hands.
No it's not, a major technological advancement was a machine that sews for you, there is very little hand sewing done any more. The second perhaps more important technological tour de force were the weaving machines, there is even less hand weaving than there is hand sewing.
The problem with the term "hand-made" is how vague it is, you would not a call a car "hand made" even though most of the parts are put together by hand.
Personally I think the sewing machine was a trickier problem than the weaving machine, We take them for granted today but it took 100 years and a real stroke of genius to figure out how to invert the process in order to make it simple enough for a machine to do it. while weaving has always utilized complex machines to make it possible.
Like your parent, I would consider that cars are, in the same sense, "hand made" both including the small runs of luxury cars (which are "hand made" in the sense where parts might not fit properly because the panel was made by Steve on Monday morning, and he got the measurements a bit wrong) and a generic mid-range SUV that Ford churned out in huge numbers where a "production line" still has humans working on every vehicle, even though they have machines to help them do a consistent job.
We should distinguish two kinds of weaving machine, fortunately my sister is a textile artist so I have to hand exactly the best examples. A few minutes walk from her home is Saltaire, which today is a tourist attraction but was historically economically important. Titus Salt's mill, for which the village provides housing and so on, had the second kind of weaving machine. The Mill produced fabric much like you'd see today, yards and yards of identical material woven at incredible speed.
But for centuries before such mills were built, the first kind of weaving machine had existed. You won't see many in use today, some kinds of University might show them to students, a few museums have one that can be demonstrated. But on the Outer Hebrides there are lots, and that's because Harris Tweed is specifically required to be made this way, on those islands, the same way Champagne has to be made in a specific way in a particular region of France.
It is in principle possible for humans to literally weave fabrics by hand, but it's ridiculously laborious, so the first machine (the one used to make Harris Tweed) makes a lot of sense. But if we're going to (and ordinarily people do) insist this counts as Hand Weaving then it seems also reasonable to say that operating a sewing machine to make a pair of jeans is also hand making clothes.
Fabric stretches. That makes it very hard to accurately handle. A size 6 dress needs to be the same size and fit as every other size 6 dress from your brand since if someone likes one they might buy more. (there is no need to be the same as someone else's size 6, but it needs to match your other size 6s)
Right, it’s like if paper was really stretchy and had tissue-paper like qualities of wanting to bunch up and fold, and you tried to make a printer. We all know how much of a struggle it can be to get paper to consistently feed without it being stretchy or wanting to bunch up…
But then also you need to make origami with it, not just print.
To some degree, paper does have those characteristics --- when one is folding it for binding, which is why books printed in signatures are more expensive, and actual sewn signatures even more so.
But say socks, the actual garment manufacture is entirely mechanical, thread goes in, machine works, socks come out. There are a bunch of human processes we add, including a QA step (the machine doesn't care if it makes occasional non-socks, a QA can see that's not a sock and dispose of it or summon maintenance if the machine starts to do this a lot) but so far as I can see the socks are made by the machine.