Cost-per-Wear and Wardrobe Planning

The concept of cost-per-wear is a handy tool for moving beyond the idea that the price of a garment is the sole determiner of its value. Obviously, the more times you wear a garment, the less it "costs".

Take just a second, and see if you can't bring to mind the number of shirts you have in your closet. Can you do this? For illustration's sake, let's just say your number is 25. This would mean that on average, each shirt gets worn around 14 times in a year (once every two weeks or so). So the CPW of each shirt would be cost/14. Now imagine you have 1oo shirts in your closet. You're going to be wearing each shirt somewhere between 3 and 4 times in a year. The hypothetical CPW is now cost/3.56 .

Can you see where this is going? The more garments you have in your closet, the fewer times you will wear each one. The fewer garments in your closet, the more you will wear each one.

Of course, this is not taking into account that according to the common understanding of the Pareto Principle, we're only really wearing 20% of what is in our closet. That other 80% is neglected because it doesn't fit, is out of style, or is forgotton.

However... what if you've designed your wardrobe so that everything in your closet gets worn regularly? That is the goal of The Very Small Closet: To design a pared-down, functional and stylish wardrobe in which you love everything you wear and everything gets worn regularly.
A pared-down closet will lend itself to a much smaller CPW...and a much more economical wardrobe.

Next time I'll discuss how quality fits into the equation.

See you then...same blog time...same blog channel....

(For more information on wardrobe planning, or to sign up for my free e-zine, please visit my Wardrobe Planning Website.)