What Your Clothing Purchase Price Implies About Your Annual Budget

When I started delving deeper into style, it became a bit of an obsession, leading to significant spending in revamping my wardrobe—twice over. One concept that fascinated me was cost per wear (CPW), which is the purchase price divided by the number of wears.

Being a Type A personality, I uploaded my wardrobe to Stylebook and commenced tracking my daily wears, a habit I've now kept daily for almost 1.5 years. This practice has already provided some good insights into which pieces get worn and which just sit in the closet.

However, I discovered that there's another layer to this. Understanding the usual frequency with which I wear items allows me to estimate the expected number of wears for a piece I am considering buying. So if I am buying jeans for 200 USD and I know that I usually wear them 40 times, I can divide the purchase price by the number of wears and estimate the average cost per wear—say, 5 USD in this example.

Going further, assuming on a given day I wear 6 pieces (e.g., pant…