Cost per wear: a better question than "is this expensive?"

"Expensive" is a comparison to other prices. It is not a comparison to anything you get. A £200 coat you wear four times a week for five years costs you about nineteen pence a wear. A £25 top worn twice costs £12.50 a wear — and it is the coat that felt like the extravagance.

The arithmetic is trivial:

cost per wear = price ÷ number of times worn

The value is not in the number. It is in what the number does to your intuitions.

What it changes

Cost per wear consistently moves money towards a small number of high-frequency items and away from a large number of low-frequency ones. That is the opposite of how most wardrobes accumulate.

Run the numbers honestly on things you own and a pattern usually appears:

Item	Price	Wears a year	Over 3 years	Per wear
Everyday coat	£200	120	360	£0.56
Jeans you reach for	£90	100	300	£0.30
White t-shirt	£30	60	180	£0.17
Occasion jacket	£150	3	9	£16.67
Trend piece	£40	4	12	£3.33

The occasion jacket costs ninety times more per wear than the coat, at three-quarters of the price. Both decisions can be right — you may genuinely need the jacket — but they are not the same kind of decision, and a price tag alone cannot tell them apart.

The honest part is the denominator

Everyone can do the division. The difficulty is that people are systematically optimistic about wear count, and the optimism is not random — it is largest exactly where the purchase is least justified.

Two questions help.

"When did I last wear the thing this replaces?" If you cannot remember wearing something similar in the last month, the new one will not be worn weekly either. The category is the predictor, not the item.

"What would have to be true for me to wear this fifty times?" Sometimes the answer is "nothing, I wear this kind of thing constantly". Sometimes it is "I would need a different job". That distinction is the whole exercise.

A useful discipline: guess the wear count before you look at the price. The price anchors the estimate otherwise, and it anchors it upward.

Where it breaks down

Cost per wear is a tool, not a philosophy. It has three real limits.

It ignores joy. Some things are worth owning for reasons that are not utility. A garment you love and wear rarely is a legitimate purchase; it is just an expensive one, and the point is to know that rather than to pretend it is thrift.

It assumes durability you have not verified. The whole case for the £200 coat collapses if it fails in eighteen months. Cost per wear only favours the more expensive option when the more expensive option actually lasts longer, and price is a weak proxy for that. A well-made £90 coat beats a badly made £250 one on every measure.

It ignores cost of ownership. Dry cleaning at £15 a time adds up faster than most people expect, and it belongs in the numerator. A wool coat that needs professional cleaning twice a winter is not a nineteen-pence-a-wear garment.

The version that actually helps

The number matters less than the reordering. In practice cost per wear pushes towards three habits:

1. Spend disproportionately on what you wear most. Outerwear, the jeans or trousers you reach for, shoes. These absorb money well because the denominator is enormous.
2. Be genuinely cheap on the low-frequency and the trend-driven. Not because quality does not matter there, but because you will not be around long enough to collect the return on it.
3. Treat "I need something for Saturday" as its own category. It is the highest cost-per-wear purchase anyone makes, it is made under time pressure, and knowing that is most of the defence against it.

The short version

• Price is a comparison to other prices. Cost per wear is a comparison to what you get.
• The division is easy; estimating the wear count honestly is the actual skill.
• Guess the wear count before you see the price.
• It only favours the expensive option if the expensive option really lasts. Add cleaning costs to the numerator.