It's not just uniform. Y-fronts lasted so long in the late '60s that they were an embarrassment.
By the late-'70s they fell apart after a couple of detachments.
Something similar happened with aircrew long-john Y-fronts. At some point, the manufacturer decided to cut them lower at the waist, but we aircrew continued to pull them up above the beer gut, as we had always done, putting unexpected stress on the seams. The result being that they didn't last as long as before; it didn't take long before the seams lost the battle.
Of course this was long before the obscenity of the 'fitness test' and other sundry embuggerances to aircrew quality of life...
But the
true clothing mystery is why one's RAFC-tailored No.1 HD was so prone to shrinking whilst sitting quietly in one's wardrobe....
Managed to get mine to last 30 years though....
Redders, remember our first Cranwellian uniforms in 1968? I'm sure that the wonderfully comfortable hairy blue horsehair would have survived Ivan's thermonuclear nasties, had the Cold War ever turned hot.
So comfortable, particularly when worn with issue 'shreddies'....
Does anyone in the RAF still wear 'blues', apart from PONTIs? I thought that it was all desert DPs or grobags these days?.