how to buy · wardrobe

Cost Per Wear, Done Honestly

House of Nova · August 11, 2026 · 3 min read

Cost per wear is the only piece of arithmetic that reliably settles an argument about whether something was worth buying. It is also the easiest to rig, which is worth understanding before you use it.

The formula

cost per wear = price ÷ number of wears

That is the version everyone quotes. The better version includes what the item costs you after you have bought it:

cost per wear = (price + maintenance) ÷ number of wears

Maintenance is dry cleaning, alterations, repairs, resoling, replacement parts. For most clothes it is negligible. For tailoring, outerwear and anything that needs specialist cleaning, it is not, and leaving it out is how a garment that seemed sensible turns out not to have been.

Worked through

A £200 jacket worn 50 times costs £4 a wear.

A £50 dress worn twice costs £25 a wear — six times more expensive than the jacket, despite costing a quarter as much.

Run it on the comparison people actually face. A £200 coat worn 100 times is £2 a wear. A £20 coat worn five times, because it lost its shape and you stopped reaching for it, is £4 a wear. The cheap coat cost twice as much per use and you no longer have a coat.

This is the entire argument for buying well, and it is a real one. But notice what it depends on.

The number you cannot verify at the till

Every cost-per-wear calculation performed before a purchase uses an invented denominator. You do not know how many times you will wear it. You are guessing, and you are guessing while standing in front of something you already want.

That is the failure mode. The formula is arithmetic, so it feels objective, and it will faithfully return whatever conclusion your guess was designed to reach. "I'll wear this constantly" turns a £600 coat into £2 a wear and the sum is not wrong — the input is.

Three ways to make it honest:

Use your own history, not your intentions. How many times did you wear last winter's coat? That number is real and you can count it. It is a far better predictor than your enthusiasm today.

Count wears, actually. Not an estimate afterwards. If you are spending seriously, the discipline of noting when you wear something for the first season will recalibrate every guess you make after that, usually downwards.

Ask what it displaces. A fifth coat cannot be worn as often as a second one, no matter how good it is, because the wears get divided among what you already own. Cost per wear treats each item as though it were alone in the wardrobe. It never is.

Where it stops being the right question

Cost per wear rewards frequency, so it is biased toward the plain. Applied strictly it says buy nothing but a black jumper.

That is a real limit, not a technicality. A garment bought for one occasion has a high cost per wear by definition and can still be the right purchase; nobody has ever calculated the cost per wear of a wedding dress and felt clarified. What the formula is genuinely good at is exposing the middle of a wardrobe — the not-quite-right things bought at moderate prices that get worn four times. Those are almost always where the money actually goes, and they never feel like the extravagance.