How long would it take the world to run out of clothing if production suddenly stopped?

This is just one of the stories from our “I’ve Always Wondered” series, where we tackle all of your questions about the world of business, no matter how big or small. Ever wondered if recycling is worth it? Or how store brands stack up against name brands? Check out more from the series here.

Anne Crabbe from Paso Robles, California, asks:

I've always wondered how long it would take for the world to run out of clothes if all production of clothes stopped at once. There are SO many clothes out there (at least here in North America). If the entire world had to use the current supply of all the clothes existing now, when would stores run out? TJ Maxx, Nordstrom Rack, all the thrift stores. I assume (and hope), we would run out of under garments first, then socks, maybe? A ton of assumptions have to be made to answer this, but can it even be answered?

Billions and billions of items of clothing are produced each year, but if clothing production suddenly stopped, snapping up all those garments might take less time than you might think.

Depending on your assumptions, it might take up to 20 years for the world to run out of clothing, said Julia DeVoy, who studies the fast-fashion industry and serves as dean of undergraduate programs and students at the Boston College Lynch School of Education and Human Development.

And yes, undergarments and socks would be the first to go, she said.

There would also be a gold rush for materials with higher-quality fiber, like cotton and denim.

"People would want that more, whether it's getting it at a thrift store, or grabbing whatever was on the shelves, or trading with other people who had closets. And there would also be a radical shift towards mending," DeVoy said.

DeVoy estimates that discount and big-box stores in the U.S. would take one month to run out of clothing. These stores operate a just-in time model, which means they only get clothing as needed.

TJX, the parent company of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, reported its days inventory at 70 days as of mid-2026, which means that shelves would last nine to 10 weeks with zero restocking based on normal demand, DeVoy said. TJX arrives at this figure by taking the existing inventory and dividing it by the current sales rate, DeVoy explained.

But if clothing production stopped, then demand would go up.

"What happened during the pandemic with certain products? People thought they couldn't get hand sanitizer,” DeVoy said. “Basically, what would happen is all the stock on the shelves, because of the just-in-time [model] and the lean inventory that actually sits in the stores, there would be a panic, and all of the existing stock would be wiped out from the store themselves,"

During COVID-19 stockpiling, sales of household staples spiked between 70% to 170% above normal, and spending on stock-up categories ran 70% to 80% above the daily average, DeVoy said.

So if we assume that panic buying doubled demand, which is a conservative estimate, then that would halve the amount of time it would normally take for clothing to run out, leaving discount stores about four to five weeks before clothing ran out, DeVoy said.

People would also look to thrift stores. Thrift stores are overwhelmed with donations, but they only use about 20% to 30% of the items they receive, DeVoy said. "The remaining 70% to 80% is currently exported, incinerated, or landfilled. This is not because it's all unsellable, but because the humongous volume exceeds available shelf capacity," DeVoy said.

But even if they sold their full backlog instead of incinerating it, DeVoy said they would still sell out in a matter of months.

As stores across the country ran out of clothing, people could tap into other sources that would probably become available. About 100 billion garments are produced a year, with 45 billion garments never reaching the buyer. This is referred to as "dead stock," which means they're never sold or end up incinerated, DeVoy said.

"There would be this giant hidden reserve that we would keep probably for about the first five years," DeVoy said.

If eight billion people received a modest one to two garments per year, each, that works out to eight to 16 billion garments annually. If there are 45 billion garments, that means there would be three to five years of deadstock, DeVoy said.

There are also massive textile waste dumps around the world, which would now become a vital resource of clothing, and there's a huge surplus of clothing in people's homes, DeVoy said.

The Atacama Desert in Chile receives 131,000 tons of used textiles annually, with over 70%, or 92,000 tons, going directly into landfills or in other illegal dumps, while Ghana's Kantamanto market in Accra receives about 15 million garments a week, of which over 40% becomes direct textile waste, DeVoy said.

"Comparable sites exist all over Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America," DeVoy said.

And people normally only wear 20% of the clothing that they own, with Americans buying 68 new clothing items a year, so they could use the remaining 80% of clothing that's sitting in their closets, DeVoy said.

She estimates that both of these sources of clothing could stretch around 15 years.

One often-cited claim is that we have enough clothing on the planet to last about six generations. But the math and even the original source behind this figure is unclear, according to the BBC, which investigated the claim's origins.

Getting a solid figure is tough – some of those garments in our closet last longer than others, which is just one of the complications that arise when trying to answer this question. "Synthetic fibers tend to last longer and they don't tend to biodegrade very quickly, so we would probably end up with more polyester," said Tasha Lewis, an associate clinical professor in fashion and retail studies at Ohio State University. "We still don't have a good timeline for how long polyester will take to go away because we still have most of it."

We'd also probably think about recycling the clothing that we do have, so we'll still have clothes available to us, Lewis said.

But since clothing production probably won't come to a halt anytime soon, we still have mountains of clothing to deal with. There have been changes in social expectations on how often you should change your clothes and how much variety you should have, said Abigail Clarke-Sather, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Minnesota Duluth who's an expert on textile recycling.

"Closet sizes have gotten bigger over the last century because we store so much that we don't know what to do with," Clarke-Sather said.