A useful study looked into the comparative value women get when they buy different pieces of clothing. Researchers ran through all the items to be found in the wardrobe of an average female and calculated the cost-per-wear ratio for each of them.
Our habitual pair of jeans won hands down (or legs up?) in this wear-and-tear competition over other items showing an excellent average wear cost of mere 9p per one spell of service.
An ordinary pair of denims, experts inform, whose price hovers around £40, are put on 428 times on the average, which makes every wear worth exactly nine pence. Compared to a pair of leggings it works out a whole lot cheaper, since the latter come to 15p per wear! For although leggings generally cost in the vicinity of a paltry £9.97, their lifespan covers but 68 times, so eventually they come out nearly twofold more expensive.
As the survey of 3,000 Brits shows, the second best money-saving item of clothing is a t-shirt or a top that stays with us for more than two years, getting worn 218 times in toto and making us pay approximately 10p per every wear.
Jumpers make another good buy: with the average cost of £25.12 they give us a 228-time wear service during three years and a couple of months of their life, which comes to 11p worth for each time you put them on. The same figure goes for bras that work for us for 162 times, their one-wear cost staying around 11p.
Trousers are definitely more expensive (in the same relative estimation), each one of their 176 times of wear valued at 14p. Jackets that put you back for a sum of about £55 are found to be worn 575 times, which shows them almost as valuable as jeans at 10p wear cost.
Only pants can really compete with the denim winner with their 7p for every one of 100 times we pull them on.
All these results are courtesy of London’s Science Museum that issued a report in support of its ‘Trash Fashion: designing out waste’ exhibition.
Dominique Driver, manager of the Trash Fashion Exhibition, pointed out that “the fact that leggings have the highest cost per wear is indicative of the throw-away fashion culture in Britain today, which is causing more than a million tonnes of textiles to end up in landfill each year.” Whereas jeans turn up more expensive than leggings when we simply compare the price tags, as soon as you work out their wear cost you find that they can boast of giving the best value for their money over a longer lifespan.
Besides, women can get hold of the wear-cost principle and employ it every time they need to prove that they really made a bargain for, say 54p per wear.
Source of the image: Photl.
