The Ledger Method

Cost per wear = price ÷ (wears per year × years of service). Three numbers in, one number out — and every input is an assumption we are obliged to show you.

How we set the inputs

Price is an editorial estimate: the typical retail price of a version built to the construction standard on the piece's page, checked against live merchant listings when the page is published. It is not a quote, and the merchant's current price governs any purchase. Repairs that a construction type predictably needs — a loafer's resole — are counted in the price, because a ledger that hides mid-life costs is marketing.

Wears per year assume a real rotation on a 33-piece rack (see The Rack): anchors are worn weekly to twice-weekly in season. A garment worn daily with no rest dies early at any quality; our figures assume rest days, which is why they are plausible.

Years of service end when the garment stops looking like itself — the fused collar bubbles, the acrylic pills, the bonded seam peels — not when it physically disintegrates. Looking worn-out is a real end of life for clothing worn in public.

Where the method breaks (we publish these too)

It ties. On the dark indigo jean, the cheap version's ledger matches the good one's — denim is simply tough. There, cost per wear is a floor, not a verdict, and the page says so. It ignores fit. A perfect-ledger garment you do not enjoy wearing gets worn less, and every input collapses; buy the version you reach for. It rewards secondhand. A used well-made piece at half price halves its cost per wear overnight — which is why several of our merchant links point at eBay's secondhand listings as readily as at new stock.

Our conflict of interest, stated

This site earns affiliate commissions when readers buy through its links, including links to the cheaper versions where a page lists them. The ledgers therefore argue, most of the time, for the purchase that pays us the most. We cannot remove that conflict; we can only publish the arithmetic in full, show the losing cases, and let the numbers be checked. The disclosure is on every page that carries a link, and the experiment's scoreboard is public: The Test.