> Poor people would still have colored clothing, because all clothing was expensive hand-made clothing back then, so the marginal cost of dying with the common plant dyes was relatively small.
To summarize from what I can remember: it wasn’t even quite that clothing was “expensive”. You didn’t buy clothing unless you were absurdly rich. You didn’t even buy cloth. You bought raw fabric, usually wool or linen, and you had to spin it into yarn or thread and then weave it into cloth. Spinning was the vast majority of the actual work you’d do though. And by “you” I meant if you were a woman, because this was always considered women’s work. And highly respected as such, to the point where even wealthy high status women took pride in still doing it or at least claiming to, or at least other people claimed it of women they admired.
Bret Deveraux has a fascinating, in-depth series about this: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
To summarize from what I can remember: it wasn’t even quite that clothing was “expensive”. You didn’t buy clothing unless you were absurdly rich. You didn’t even buy cloth. You bought raw fabric, usually wool or linen, and you had to spin it into yarn or thread and then weave it into cloth. Spinning was the vast majority of the actual work you’d do though. And by “you” I meant if you were a woman, because this was always considered women’s work. And highly respected as such, to the point where even wealthy high status women took pride in still doing it or at least claiming to, or at least other people claimed it of women they admired.