I tracked what I bought over a year, how much each item cost, and how many times I actually wore it. The exercise was uncomfortable and it changed how I buy.
The cost per wear calculation
The number that makes it concrete.
Divide the price by the number of times worn. A garment costing a modest amount and worn twice costs more per wear than something expensive worn a hundred times.
This is not a new idea and applying it retrospectively to a year of purchases was startling.
My cheapest purchases had the highest cost per wear by a wide margin. Several items had been worn once. A few had never been worn at all.
My most expensive items — a coat, a pair of boots, one bag — had the lowest, by a factor of ten or more.
Why the cheap things went unworn
The pattern was consistent once I looked.
They were bought for a specific look rather than for a wardrobe. When the look moved on, the item had no other role.
They did not combine with anything, because they had been chosen as a complete outfit rather than as a component.
They fitted approximately, since the purchase was driven by wanting the item rather than by it suiting me.
And several were of a quality that made them unpleasant to wear a second time, which is a real and underdiscussed factor.
The acceleration is the mechanism
What makes this worse than it used to be.
A trend with a useful life of three months cannot produce a garment with a low cost per wear, regardless of price, unless it is worn constantly during those three months.
Which is arithmetic rather than judgement. Short cycles guarantee poor value.
And the cycles have shortened, driven by the same forces that produced the dispersion of aesthetics — fast production, dispersed influence, and recommendation systems that reward novelty.
The disposal end
The part that is easiest to ignore.
Clothing donated to charity is only partly resold locally. A substantial proportion is baled and exported, and a proportion of that is unsellable and becomes waste in the receiving country.
This has been documented repeatedly, and the receiving countries have raised it as a serious problem.
Which means disposing of unwanted clothing is not the neutral act that donation implies, and the volume is the issue rather than the destination.
What changed for me
Three rules, applied for about eighteen months now.
A waiting period. Anything I want goes on a list for a fortnight. A substantial proportion of what I wanted no longer appeals after two weeks, which is the single most effective change.
A combination test. Before buying, identify three things I already own that it works with. If I cannot, it is an outfit rather than a garment.
And a replacement rule for the fast categories. Something in, something out, which forces the question of whether it is genuinely better than what it replaces.
What I did not change
Being honest, because total restraint is not a realistic position.
I still buy things I do not need and enjoy the process, which is a legitimate pleasure that does not require justification.
What I stopped doing was buying things I did not want, which is what most of the failed purchases turned out to be — acquisitions driven by a feed rather than by any actual desire for the object.
The distinction is clearer than I expected once I started noticing it.
The second-hand adjustment
The change that has made the largest difference to the arithmetic.
Buying second-hand removes most of the cost of being wrong. A poor decision at a fraction of retail, resold afterwards for something close to what was paid, costs very little.
It also gives access to the slow categories at prices that make sense, since well-made older garments are frequently cheaper than poorly made new ones.
The trade is time. Finding specific things second-hand takes considerably longer than buying new, which is the actual reason most people do not.
The number
My year of tracking produced a total I would not have guessed within a factor of two, concentrated in a large number of small purchases rather than in a few large ones.
Which is the general finding. The expensive items are visible and considered. The accumulation of small ones is invisible and larger.
The rental option
Worth assessing since it is presented as the answer to exactly this.
Renting for occasions removes the ownership problem for things worn once, which is genuinely the category where cost per wear is worst.
The complications are that transport and cleaning carry their own impact, that the economics only work above a certain garment value, and that services have struggled commercially.
Where it works well is formal occasion wear, which is expensive, worn rarely, and where a single wear is the expectation anyway.
Where it works poorly is everyday clothing, where the per-wear cost of renting exceeds owning quickly.