Price per Wear, Without the Wishful Thinking

A blazer at $320, worn 35 times a year for five years, comes to $1.83 a wear on price alone and $2.29 once care and resale are counted. The second figure is the honest one, and it is the one almost nobody calculates. Cost per wear does not fail because the division is difficult. It fails because four of its five inputs are estimates, and all four lean the same way: toward a lower number than the garment will deliver.

A wear count you can defend

The wear count is where the optimism enters. A new garment gets worn often in its first months, partly because it is new and partly because it has not yet been absorbed into a rotation. Counting the first year and multiplying by expected life assumes that rate holds for a decade, which it does not. Use the second-year rate, or discount the first-year figure by about a third.

Garment	Wears a year	Working life	Lifetime wears
Work trousers, per pair in a four-pair rotation	45-55	4 years	180-220
Blazer, per jacket in a three-jacket rotation	30-40	5 years	150-200
White tee	30-40	18 months	45-60
Fine merino crewneck	25-35	4 years	100-140
Occasion dress	3-6	6 years	18-36
Winter coat	60-80	8 years	480-640

The numbers assume a five-day office week and a wardrobe in rotation, and they are lower than the counts most cost-per-wear arguments use.

Two constraints cut the count further. Laundry sets a hard ceiling: wool trousers take two to three wears between cleans, so one pair cannot see more than about 90 wears a year. And working life is set by the weakest component, usually the seat seam or the zip on trousers, the lining at the armhole on a jacket.

Care sits in the numerator

Dry cleaning is the largest recurring cost in tailored clothing and the one the simple formula leaves out. A wool trouser cleaned every fifth wear, at 50 wears a year, is ten cleans. At $8 to $15 a clean, that is $80 to $150 a year: over four years, more than the trousers cost.

Not everything carries that burden. A fine merino crewneck washed by hand every four or five wears uses a capful of wool wash from a $12 to $20 bottle that lasts a season. A cotton shirt laundered at home costs cents a wear, which is one reason a $60 shirt can beat a $200 one that must be dry cleaned.

Repairs are small until they are not

Repairs divide into maintenance and rescue. A hem at $15 to $40, a zip at $25 to $65 and a waist take-in at $20 to $50 are maintenance: they keep a garment that already fits in service, and annualized they are small. A $40 waist take-in on trousers kept four years adds $10 a year.

Rescue is different. Narrowing a shoulder at $90 to $200 is an attempt to turn the wrong size into the right one, and the cost belongs in the purchase price, not the maintenance column. What alterations cost, job by job sets out the ranges.

Resale is a net number

Resale enters the formula with a minus sign, which makes it the most abused input. Platforms and consignment shops commonly keep 20 to 40 percent of the sale price. The garment also has to be cleaned, photographed, listed and shipped, and the shipping is usually yours.

A coat that sells for $120 might net $80. A coat that does not sell nets nothing, and it has already cost the cleaning. Subtract only a figure checked against live listings for that brand, style and condition, and only if you actually sell. A resale value you never realize is a discount you never received.

The comparison, worked

Run two jackets at the same rate of wear. The first costs $320, is worn 35 times a year for five years, cleaned twice a season at $15, and sells at the end for $120, netting $70. That is (320 + 150 - 70) / 175, or $2.29 a wear.

The second costs $90 and lasts two and a half years before the lining fails at the armhole. It sees 87 wears, needs $75 of cleaning in that time, and has no resale value. That is (90 + 75) / 87, or $1.90.

The cheaper jacket wins for a reason the formula cannot see: the expensive one is charged five years of cleaning and credited with resale, the cheap one two and a half years and nothing. Raise the wear rate to 60 a year and the gap narrows to $1.33 against $1.10. Set resale at zero and the expensive jacket climbs to $2.69, more than 40 percent above the cheap one. The answer moves with the inputs, which is an argument for filling them in honestly, not for abandoning the method.

Three cases where the formula misleads

Occasion wear. A $400 dress worn four times is $100 a wear, and the arithmetic says no. The alternative is not zero. Rental runs $120 to $180 an event, arrives in one size, cannot be altered for length or shoulder, and photographs the same at the second wedding as at the first. For a garment whose job is to be correct on four specific evenings, frequency is the wrong measure.

Items that unlock other outfits. A $250 pair of boots at 50 wears a year looks expensive beside a $90 pair at the same count. If the boots also bring six pairs of trousers back into service by fixing a hem line, their denominator is not 50. The unit of the calculation is the outfit, not the garment.

Consumables. A white tee is retired by a stain at the collar or a stretched neck, not by worn-out cloth, so its life is capped at 45 to 60 wears whatever it cost. The formula will correctly report that a $60 tee costs three times more per wear than a $20 one, and it will say nothing about which looks better on the twentieth wear. When a cheaper version is good enough takes that question further.

A decision rule for two garments

Fill in the same wear count for both, taken from the table rather than from hope. Add care only if you will pay for it, and be honest about whether you will. Subtract resale only if you sell. Then read the numbers.

If the two sit within 20 percent of each other, the arithmetic has stopped discriminating. Decide on shoulder seam placement, cloth and color, which are the things the number cannot price. If one is more than double the other, check whether the wear counts differ for a reason: they usually do, because the expensive garment is worn more often precisely because it fits, and the count is an effect of quality rather than an input to it.

The comparison is the point: cost per wear weighs two things you are holding, and it does not justify something already decided. Run it before the card, not after.