Cost per wear: the one number that fixes how you buy clothes

The average wardrobe is a graveyard of good intentions. The numbers from the circular-fashion research are blunt, and the cure is a single division: what it cost, divided by how often it left the house.

The utilisation collapse

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation's A New Textiles Economy found that the number of times a garment is worn before being discarded fell 36% in fifteen years, while production doubled. Under-use and lack of recycling cost the industry more than USD 500 billion a year in lost value. In the UK, WRAP's 2022 survey counted 118 items in the average adult's wardrobe, 31 of them unworn for at least a year: 1.6 billion garments doing nothing.

Why cost per wear changes behaviour

A £190 jacket worn twice cost £95 a wear. A £120 pair of shoes worn 61 times cost £2. Put those two numbers next to each other and the expensive purchase is obviously the shoes, and the cheap one is the jacket. The number reframes value from the price tag to the life of the item, which is the only frame in which buying fewer, better things is rational rather than virtuous.

It also exposes the gaps that drive the waste: the "nothing formal" that leads to a panic buy, the "no outerwear" that makes the cold-weather pieces unwearable.

Keeping the ledger without spreadsheets

The reason nobody tracks cost per wear is that it requires logging what you wore. Logging is the part that fails. It works only if the log is a by-product of something you wanted anyway: an outfit you chose in the morning and marked as worn at night, with a reminder, becomes a wear count without a spreadsheet.

How PeakClothes keeps it

Add prices to the pieces you care about; every outfit you log increments the wear counts; the Cost per wear screen ranks the pieces earning their keep and the ones that are not. Shopping gaps flag the missing category so the next purchase is a wearer, not another jacket.