A fourteen-dollar t-shirt and a thirty-four-dollar t-shirt get compared on price divided by wears, not on price alone, and until you do that division you don’t actually know which one is cheaper. Cost per wear is purchase price over the number of times you put the thing on, and it is one of the few pieces of consumer math that changes its answer depending on how you actually live, not just what you buy.
The formula, stated plainly
Cost per wear equals price divided by wears. Not price divided by years owned, and not price divided by washes. Wears. A forty-dollar sweater worn four times before it goes to the donation bin cost ten dollars a wear, worse than a bad restaurant meal. The same sweater worn two hundred times cost twenty cents a wear, cheaper than a stick of gum. The garment didn’t change. The denominator did.
This is why the formula is more honest than “cost per year,” which is how most people actually think about clothing budgets. A shirt that sits folded in a drawer for three years accrues zero wears and an undefined cost per wear, or an infinite one, depending on how you want to punish yourself for the purchase. The clock that matters isn’t the calendar. It’s the closet.
What the research actually says about how long clothes last
WRAP, the UK’s Waste and Resources Action Programme, has measured this twice, a decade apart, and the two numbers disagree with each other. Its original 2012 report, “Valuing Our Clothes,” assumed clothing had an average lifetime of 2.2 years, a figure drawn from EU life-cycle research. WRAP’s 2017 follow-up, “Valuing Our Clothes: the cost of UK fashion,” ran its own consumer tracker survey and found something different: clothing lasts an average of 3.3 years before it’s discarded or passed on. WRAP is explicit that the two figures were produced with different methods and aren’t directly comparable, and it reports both rather than picking one.
The 2017 survey also broke the number out by garment type, asking respondents how long they’d owned the last item of each kind they wore and how much longer they expected to keep wearing it. Coats topped the list at 4.58 years across 547 respondents. Dresses came in at 3.62 years. T-shirts sat near the bottom at 2.78 years, across 554 respondents, just above trousers at 2.81 and tops at 2.74. A t-shirt, in other words, is one of the shortest-lived garment categories in the closet, whatever it costs.
None of these are cycle counts. WRAP’s survey measured calendar time, self-reported, not laundering cycles or actual wear events. That gap matters for the arithmetic below, and it’s the honest limit of what this research can tell you.
Doing the division
Here’s a worked comparison. A fourteen-dollar t-shirt from a fast-fashion retailer, and DRESS’s Logo Tee, a 6.1 oz heavyweight cotton jersey shirt priced at $34.
Assume both shirts get worn with the same frequency, since they’re going into the same rotation in the same closet. That assumption does something useful to the math: wears per year appears in both the numerator and denominator of the comparison and cancels out entirely. What’s left is a clean rule. The pricier shirt only needs to outlast the cheaper one by the same ratio as the price gap to break even on cost per wear. Thirty-four divided by fourteen is about 2.4. So the $34 shirt needs to survive roughly 2.4 times longer, in actual wears, than the $14 shirt to tie it. Anything longer than that and the expensive shirt wins outright.
Using WRAP’s t-shirt figure of 2.78 years as a stand-in for how long an average, unremarkable t-shirt lasts before it’s set aside, the heavyweight shirt would need to survive about 6.7 years to hit that breakeven, at the same wear frequency. Whether a 6.1 oz cotton tee actually gets there is not something any published study has measured. What can be said, and this is textile mechanics rather than a wear-count study, is that a denser knit has more fiber mass to abrade through before it thins, which is a real reason to expect a longer working life from a heavier fabric, not a guarantee of one. DRESS has no wear-testing data of its own to cite here, and no reviews on file to draw from, so the honest answer stops at the mechanism, not a number.
The case where the cheap shirt wins
Run the numbers the other direction and the cheap shirt’s advantage is real, not a rounding error. If you replace shirts for reasons that have nothing to do with fabric failure, a body that changed size, a fit you got tired of, a color you no longer wear, a hole worn straight through the elbow doesn’t have to happen for the shirt to be done. In that scenario, the durability of the fabric never gets tested, because the shirt leaves the rotation before the cotton does. A fourteen-dollar shirt discarded at eighteen months for reasons of taste has already beaten a thirty-four-dollar shirt on cost per wear, full stop, because the thirty-four-dollar shirt never got the chance to accumulate the wears its price requires.
The same logic runs against anyone who buys expensive clothing and treats it carefully enough to rarely wear it. A shirt kept for good occasions, worn six times a year, extends its calendar life at the direct expense of its wear count, and cost per wear punishes caution as hard as it punishes cheapness. The formula doesn’t care about intent. It only counts wears.
Why this adds up past one shirt
The reason any of this is worth doing at all, and not just an amusing division problem, shows up at the scale of a closet rather than a single shirt. The EPA estimated 17 million tons of textiles were generated as waste in the United States in 2018, of which 11.3 million tons went to landfill and only 14.7 percent got recycled. That’s not a story about any one purchase decision. It’s a story about replacement rate, how often a garment leaves a closet and a new one enters it, and cost per wear is the closest thing to a personal replacement-rate calculator that fits on the back of a receipt.
A shirt bought to be worn until it’s actually finished, not until the next one looks better, is the one input in this whole equation a shopper actually controls. DRESS’s tees are cut from 6.1 oz cotton jersey and union made in the United States, cut and sewn through printing, which is a fact about how the shirt is built, not a promise about how long any one person will wear it.
Do the division before the purchase, not after. A shirt that never gets worn out because it never gets worn is the one number this formula was built to catch.
