I’ve tracked every piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years
reaktor.com
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The first year I did this I probably gave away about 60% of my wardrobe and never missed a single item I parted with -- a number of which still had the store tags on them. Even though this frees me up to purchase new clothes as I need them throughout the year without filling my closet up to the breaking point, I find that it puts a small routine in the back of my mind that makes me far more frugal with clothes and as a result I buy very little. If I really need some specialty clothing for something, it's usually a tuxedo or something I can probably rent or borrow.
It's sort of a zero effort, self-documenting, positional tracking system.
Just about the only thing I buy these days is underwear, socks, replacement shoes, and the odd article of either travel or outdoor-related clothing.
This year of course was weird, but for various reasons turned out to not be hugely different in terms of old clothes with one exception -- slacks. So I'm currently going through a triage of slacks and wearing one per day for fit and to check for problems to find any to toss or give away.
Every few months, I look to the right and if I see things I never wore (and have no plans to wear), I donate them. Obv I don't do this with out of season items, but generally, work shirts are work shirts (if it's cold, I add a cardigan or blazer).
Unlike the blog author, I don't track underwear. First, all my undershirts are the same - I'd have to label them to differentiate. I tend to simply chuck them all in the "rags" bin once a year and replace en masse. And underpants last for ages, so I don't see the need to bother.
I should track shoes, just to see what happens. They're so specialized and seasonal, I haven't bothered. Chukkas for winter, loafers for 3 season wear, boat shoes for the worst of summer, etc.
This is the part that it's infuriating to me: I would willingly pay more if I knew which items are of good quality, but quite often there is no way to tell. One would assume that price is a proxy for quality, but (as seen here) this is rarely so: yes, the quality item is probably more expensive, but you can also easily buy items that are both expensive and bad.
Of course there are ways. It’s called product research and asking friends. For example, I could have told him that with Diesel shoes you are paying for style and branding, not performance or durability.
One general rule of thumb that has worked well for me, is to look at how much marketing focus is on selling you a lifestyle and the brand name itself. The higher the focus is on brand name and identity, the less they trust the product to sell itself on its inherent qualities.
Unfortunately there is no easy way to ascertain the quality of a particular item. You may be buying online, with only pictures and a description to go on. Sometimes the quality looks and feels acceptable in the store, but the workmanship itself is bad, so the item falls apart after a short time.
You can certainly learn to distinguish quality by feeling the fabric and looking at the stitching, but there are so many places to hide shoddy quality out of sight. What I've concluded is that I generally go for items with as little or as discreet branding as possible, as my very first filter. The flashier an item is, the lower I expect the quality to be. It also meshes will with my desire to not be a walking advertising banner. That considerably narrows the list of items I'll have to research in detail.
Learning which manufacturers and retailers can be trusted is hard. They may change their suppliers, but keep the same product name, it's hard to know this, unless they specifically tell you. Some online retailers will have only the barest possible information on a product, such as nominal size and color and nothing else, while others will give you an entire rundown of the materials used, which thoughts went into the design, how you can expect a given cut to fit and a full listing of all the important measurements, plus tell you where it was manufactured. That last bit is shockingly absent on so many online shops.
And please do try to go for local production and organic/repurposed materials whenever possible :-)
Basically, if you know what you need to look for in terms of material selection, stitching, hem design and tolerances, you can pretty quickly evaluate the design life of clothing and then compare it to the price.
There's many guides out there that tell you what to look for as a final result but I haven't seen a good guide break it down to fundamental material science but the back derivation is not especially difficult.
I wear a shirt that many times in a year, and they last many years.
Granted, my shirts probably aren't as fancy as his and don't cost as much, but that's even more reason to be horrified.
My accounting data says I got those shirts in August 2018. I have worn one of these 15 T-shirts everyday since then (with very few exceptions, e.g. when formal wear was called for). Let's round that to 2.5 years, i.e. 912 days, i.e. about 60 wears per shirt. I'm not seeing any significant degradation on these shirts, so I can easily see myself wearing these at least another 3 years, which would be over 130 wears per shirt.
For reference, this is the model I'm wearing right now: http://www.gildan.se/en/o61001-en-grey
They have been demoted of course. But the wear is fine as long as I don’t attend a wedding or a job interview.
Shirts with print, for me, would fall under T-shirts and tanks. The few ones I have, definitely wear faster.
My underwear shirts are the ones that tend to last 20-25 times. After that, they are no longer fresh. And I don't mean fresh as new, but rather unfresh to the extent of not being ok through a long day at work.
Some, I continue using as sportswear also :)
Just to say, each their own. The article is interesting on its own without people judging the author's habits.
FWIW, like the author, I spend a small fortune on clothing/shoes, but I tend to wear items until they're threadbare. A few items here and there end up donated, but largely by the time I'm done with something, it goes into a rag pile for cleaning bicycles.
I actually also keep wearing many of the clothes until they are really worn out. The exception is work clothes, mainly button down shirts. In this context, I consider something divested when I no longer can wear it in its original intended context (e.g. work). I might continue use at my summer home or digging in the garden. And likewise, eventually if not donated they also end up in a rag pile for cleaning, or into the cotton recycling that fashion stores have to provide.
And yes, mine would have been "wearable" too, only not at work anymore. I did keep wearing some of them in a rather casual way at my summer house for a while. But in that use, I considered them divested.
Washing certainly takes its toll. In my case, wear shows both "technically", as the fabric and details weakening, but also as a general decline in freshness. And i don't mean fresh-as-new, but rather pure whites turning yellowish. They become unfit for my work context. Some of this wear is from washing, some is from deterioration during long days at work.
I also was my socks after each use. Here it would seem washing really is the main source of wear as it is very evenly spread.
> Underwear shirts typically last between 20 and 25 times.
This person must have very different wear standards from me, as I would guess my “underwear” shirts last 50+ wears over many years. Although I don’t wear those often, so I admit I may be overestimating how many wears they face.
FWIW it’s also about how many washes they face. It’s good to wear clothes more than once per wash, assuming light wear and they aren’t smelly, because washing wears them out a lot more than wearing them does.
> But my shirts stand out in a league of their own. I spend 751 euros on shirts yearly. Do you recall my costly affection to high quality shirts? Well, here it shows.
Ok now I know this person lives in a different world from me :)
I do really agree about buying for quality and thinking in terms of cost per wear.
I’ve had great luck with Mack Weldon for t-shirts and undershirts. I especially like the “silver” fabric t-shirts, and I can confidently say I’m getting > 50 wears off these given how long I’ve had mine and how often I wear them. They do eventually wear thinner and looser, but have not developed any tears or holes. And, specifically the silver fabric is amazing in how fresh and clean it always smells. You really can wear it 4-5 times, you only need to wash it when it eventually gets stains.
I should clearly try out those Mack Weldon shirts.
Buying too expensive clothes, and you'll drive into problems like outrageous brand-name surcharges, fabrics which may be too fine.
I have yet to find a perfectly fine one-stop shop for all my clothes, so I rather focused on finding the best I could with my own criteria in mind. Online shopping has made this a breeze, if the clothes are consistent in size and quality. Websites like yoox, lyst, etc. make it possible to purchase high quality and dollar items, to very good prices.
Not judging, to each his own, I just wonder if I'm the outlier or if he is.
2 - casual brown leather (jeans, slacks, etc)
1 - nice brown leather (suits, jeans+blazer, etc)
1 - nylon (hiking pants)
I currently have 14 pairs of shoes, but about half of those really should be thrown away and I just keep around for wearing on rainy days or in the garden.
When I started to shave around age 17, I got one of these Gillette 5-blade razors, and it came with two replacement heads in the same box. When those were worn out, I bought a 10-pack of replacement heads. I'm now 31 years old and I'm now halfway through that same 10-pack.
Working in Canada one summer, I recall people often asking why I had some many shoes :)
As to the rather large amount of clothes, some items are at my summer house (most Finns have a summer house to go hide in). This inflates total inventory.
I have been living for a few years in SE Asia - happy times - shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops mostly.
But here in Central Europe (Poland) where we really have 5-6 seasons (early Spring being different from Spring and early Fall from late Fall) and the amount of clothing and shoes you need is insane.
You generally need different type of shoes/pants for each season and then at least a double (nice ones and ordinary ones). So different shoes/pants/jackets/etc. for strong Winter, mild Winter, early Spring and late Spring, early Fall and late Fall, hot Summer and rainy Summer etc. It accumulates even of you are not wearing all in one year.
Biannual laundry might be taking it too far! Jeans don’t need washing every day, and I will often use the same ones for a couple of weeks, especially while WFH. But after a couple of weeks you might notice a bit of odor if you bring them close(ok most people won’t get close enough to smell your jeans). And they will noticeably loosen, wrinkle, and lose the more form fitting shape they have after a hot wash/dry.
Another factor that may not be as relevant when working from home* is that general dust and dirt settles in and between the cotton fibers and act as abrasives. You can get a lot of that out by giving your jeans a vigorous shake out the window, but cotton is very absorbent and will hold on to dirt and grime, so it's a losing battle. If you never wash them, the wear will accelerate and ruin the fabric, especially in folds and creases.
As an aside, some of the "common knowledge" around jeans actually does apply to wool clothes since unlike cotton, the wool fibers have a hydrophobic outer layer, so they will repel dirt. Hanging wool clothes overnight and giving them a shake the next morning is often more than enough to refresh them, cabin luggage-only travelers love merino wool t-shirts for this reason, they can be worn for several days before needing a wash, without developing odors.
* Are people wearing jeans when working from home? As long as I'm staying inside, I'm wearing comfy cotton pajama pants and a hoodie or a robe all day, it's so comfortable. The real pants or jeans are only worn for going outside.
Yes. All of my jeans are part elastane and are very comfy.
But none those are even close to being as comfortable as pajama pants or sweatpants. When I'm lounging at home, I want nothing to bind or sit tightly, comfort is king.
Wearing a belt while sitting down puts a lot of pressure on your midsection, but even wearing suspenders (which I highly recommend), you still feel the waistband. Of course you get used to it, but why not just go straight for comfort?
On a completely different topic, I have discovered that the clothes dryer has a similar impact on the lifespan of clothes that smoking does on people. If you can manage, hanging your clothes to dry – for example, over the back of a chair or whatever – will make them last longer, though I’m not sure if it’s the heat or the spinning that does the damage. (I’ve been trying to dry things on low heat for longer, but I’m not sure if that helps and I’m too lazy to put together a spreadsheet like this person.)
Ideally I would get all my clothes from thrift stores, but I've only really had any luck with shirts. Pants in my size are rare as hen's teeth in thrift stores.
> "the clothes dryer has a similar impact on the lifespan of clothes that smoking does on people"
It's the combination of heat and agitation, especially if you let the dryer run until the clothes are completely bone dry. Look at how much fluff collects in the filter, that is fabric that has been beaten out of your clothes. With that sort of treatment, it's no wonder clothes start to look threadbare after a while.
If you're the camping/hiking/bushcraft type, dryer lint is absolutely amazing tinder, so at least it has some practical use :-)
So if of interest, ask me anything! :)
I'm in Helsinki (GMT +2), so sorry about the latency that might cause.
But you're absolutely right that this has taken some accumulated amount of effort to build. If I had done this as a consulting project, it would have cost something like two decades worth of clothes. So as a total investment, hardly worth the while. But I would to think that perhaps something good comes out of this way of looking at it.
Now I'm in a way done and find that I look for the next thing to fill that new void in my mental real estate.
These days I live in Europe and getting desperate. Before Covid the occasional trip back to Cali allowed me to restock. I even went and BOUGHT clothes from Macy's.
tldr; VAT and cultural norms make clothing disproportionately expensive.
I'm not sure if you are completely serious about never buying clothes, I've certainly never seen trousers on offer before but I'm convinced someone could get by on free t-shirts with little difficulty.
:-)
I normally go to a lot of events. Even without actively seeking them out, I end up with piles of t-shorts (which I do fairly regularly wear around home in the summer). I've given bags of them away but they still seem to accumulate over time. Very few of them are ones I've purchased. But, yeah, I've never seen a pair of pants as swag. That is something I have to periodically buy when they start getting ratty or stained.
Well it is wasteful in terms of money, materials, and environmental impact. And many people that didn’t grow up with the resources to do this will resent or envy your display of excess. And to some it may come off as trying too hard to be liked and fashion conforming - as in truly wealthy people don’t need to impress you with fashion.
Having said that, I ended up owning way more shoes than I wanted simply by being active: I started owning trekking shoes (1) and a pair of regular sneakers for casual sport only (2) until I started going to a gym that required exclusively indoor shoes (3). I later added running to my routine, so I bought a set of good, expensive running shoes to keep my knees in good shape (4). In addition to that, my new job requires dress shoes, so I now own two pairs of those (5, 6) in case I get mud in one of them and I don't feel like cleaning them right after work (which is a thing that happens). Add flip-flops (7) and comfy indoor shoes at home (8), and here we are.
In the US, my experience is that people will sometimes/often take off shoes when they come into a home especially if they're going to track in snow, mud, etc. But it's certainly nothing like a universal rule and probably isn't even the norm.
I guess what I'm saying is, it's not an American thing, it's a gym thing.
What I find odd in this article is the amount of T-Shirts that gets worn off. Maybe because I tend to wear "technical" T-Shirts they don't .
I have at least 8 pairs of sneakers now in the shoe closet in the hallway + 4 or 5 "good Sunday shoes" and 2 pairs of cold weather / walking shoes.
Sneakers don't really age and your size doesn't change, they only get old when worn. So there is no reason not to buy several color combinations you like and wear whichever you think looks nice today. I would call I think half of mine "white" but in more detail they have different stripes and styles.
Dress shoes the same, they last forever and I have them in more or less formal looking as well as colors that match different suits/belts combinations.