Then there is no problem. Cloth is available for gil. Gil is easy to obtain. Cloth is easy to obtain.
Cursed Mariner's Cotton Cloth. I've been grinding boarskin maps and exhausting my retainers with quick ventures for a couple weeks now and I've only been able to land one of these. Four more to go before I can finally plop a couple of beach chairs into my island sanctuary.
If you're doing crafting log completion, I'm surprised a couple mil in cloth is even something you blink at. There's so many other things that will spit up wild profit margins on the way. It's just hard to believe that 'gil's not the problem' when there's any kind of hesitation like that.
Genuinely, though, there's so few items like this that hold any value at all anymore. Let a couple scrape through for the good vibes when one pops out of a map or an old Palace bronze sack or whatever - so, so many have been killed by lootboxes and the quick venture list and so on through the years. Completionism's never meant to be a cakewalk, anyway.
Buy cheap Moonfire gear off the MB and desynthesize it. The Moonfire Vest tends to be the best, you can get up to 3 cloth from a desynthesis and it usually costs less than the Halter (which also gives up to 3). The head and leg items can give 2 and the feet items 1 (though I would skip the feet unless they're super cheap).
I'll clear out marketboards of cheap Moonfire gear on occasion just for this purpose. I've still got about 150 cloth left from my last trip that I've been drip feeding to the marketboards both as cloth and as Beach Chairs. It's crazy how much the cloth is going for when players can buy the Moonfire items for less than the cost of a single piece of Mariner Cotton Cloth (the Beach Chair and a couple of the Sailor pieces are a different story).
Thanks for the tip...I did not even consider that avenue. Will have to see if I can track down this cheap gear. Just trying to get them without making the big gil sink. Ironically the RNG gods heard my grievance from yesterday as I managed to land a cloth from the map I did last night, lol.