Fashion Math: A Cost per Wear Calculator

How to Determine Which Price Level Works for You

Over the past week, one key topic dominated my Substack feed: the inflation of the pieces influencers have been promoting along with the declining quality. There has been a lot of great discussion in the 'stack, started by Kelly from

Midimalist

, about influencers moving to promoting more expensive pieces as they progress in their careers. This makes followers either feel like everyone has a Birkin bag or feel detached from the influencer. A very interesting influencer perspective came from Jess Graves at The Love List, who explained how, naturally, with success, influencers get more gifts or may target a more expensive demographic.

In my view, Kelly’s piece resonated because, when you are in a social media bubble, it may seem like influencers are almost your friends, creating the impression that everyone’s wearing The Row. In reality, even within the same aesthetic, fashion budgets are completely personal and can vary widely. So, I am personally very happy for the influencers and the careers they have built, while at the same time, I appreciate the sanity check: just because there are plenty of Birkin bags floating around in your feed, it doesn't mean you should be saving for or looking to buy one.

So I decided to contribute to the topic with the thing I know best - Excel - and design a calculator that shows in hard numbers what a purchase may imply about your fashion budget, cost per wear, and longevity per item. When luxury brands market their products, or when we really want to buy something slightly outside our price range, it is frequently justified by the idea that "I will wear it all the time and the cost per wear will be almost 0." I hope this calculator will help shed light on what it really means to wear things all the time.

It works like this: choose the product type you are considering (a bag can be worn much more than a T-shirt), share how much you expect to wear it, and the calculator will show how long the piece will last for you, the cost per wear, and the implied annual budget (if all of your pieces have the same cost per wear). It also assumes that you wear 6 pieces daily and there is no resale value after you are done. Let me share a few examples below.

The Row T-shirt at $350

Let’s start with some luxury pieces. Consider The Row T-shirt at $350. Enter this into the calculator. Now, since this is The Row, let’s say this is a splurge and you are planning to wear it all the time.

The calculator suggests 100 wears, which for a T-shirt is a very high number - I do not have a single T-shirt with that rotation even though I love T-shirts. We also assume that The Row has the quality and longevity to last that many wears. This number of wears means wearing the same T-shirt weekly for almost 2 years, or daily for about 3 months, giving us a cost per wear of $3.50 and an annual fashion budget of $7,665.

Zara T-shirt at $15

Now, let’s look at the opposite example: a Zara T-shirt. For fast fashion pieces, I would not suggest choosing a very high number of wears as I really doubt Zara would last 100 or 50 wears.

This gives us the following result. Yes, it is a lower cost per wear than The Row, but not as much as you would expect. Additionally, a moderate number of wears at 11 can even be too optimistic - research suggests that on average, we wear our clothes 7 times.