Cost per wear is what a piece of clothing costs you each time you put it on: its price divided by the number of times you wear it. It turns a price tag into a measure of value. A 200 coat worn 200 times costs 1 per wear; a 25 top worn three times costs more than 8. Enter your numbers below: nothing is saved, and you don't need an account.
Formula: (price + care − resale) ÷ number of wears
The basic formula is simple: price divided by the number of wears. A pair of boots bought for 150 and worn 100 times costs 1.50 per wear.
Two refinements make it more honest. Care costs are part of the price of keeping a garment: resoling those boots once for 40 brings them to 1.90 per wear. Resale value comes off the total: if you sell them for 30 at the end, the cost drops back to 1.60 per wear. The calculator above applies both: (price + care − resale) ÷ wears.
The price tag tells you what a garment costs once. Cost per wear tells you what it costs for the use you actually get from it. That is why a cheap piece you rarely wear often turns out to be the expensive one, and why a well-made basic you reach for every week ends up costing very little.
It is also a useful brake before buying. Asking "how many times will I really wear this?" before paying settles a lot of impulse purchases on its own.
For a piece you don't own yet, estimate wears per month × months of use. A jumper you would wear four times a month during five cold months, for three winters, adds up to sixty wears.
Be conservative: most people overestimate how often they will wear something new. Seasonal pieces, occasion wear and anything that needs a specific outfit around it are worn less than we imagine. If the estimate only works with optimistic numbers, that is an answer in itself.
It is a measure of value, not a verdict. It says nothing about comfort, about how a piece makes you feel, or about the pleasure of wearing something special twice a year. A wedding outfit will always have a high cost per wear, and that is fine.
It also leaves out the environmental cost of making the garment. On that front the logic points the same way, though: the more you wear what you already own, the lower both the financial and the environmental cost of each wear.
Fring does this calculation for every piece you own: note when you wear something and each piece shows its real cost per wear, along with an estimate of its footprint. Free, in your browser, nothing to install.
