Cost per wear is the number you get when you take the price of a piece of clothing and divide it by the number of times you wear it. The higher the number, the worse the investment. The lower the number, the better it is behaving as an item you bought.
The formula is fine. What people usually get wrong is the counting, and the accounting.
The counting problem
Most people massively overestimate how often they wear a specific item. The clean way to test this on yourself is to pick five pieces you "wear all the time" and quietly log every wear for a month. You will find that two of them are honestly high-frequency, two are medium, and one is a story you tell about yourself.
This matters because the piece you tell a story about is usually the piece you bought at full price, remember fondly, and cite when defending the next similar purchase. It is the piece most likely to distort your buying pattern.
The accounting problem
Textbook cost per wear only counts the sticker price. In practice, a piece of clothing has running costs. Some are small, but some are not.
- Dry cleaning at £8 to £15 per visit for wool and silk.
- Repairs: replacement zips, reattached buttons, hem-shortening.
- Storage: the cedar block, the garment bag, the vacuum pack.
- Alterations you paid for on day one and forgot to add.
- The shoes you had to buy because the trousers only worked with them.
A silk shirt that costs £180 and is dry-cleaned four times a year for three years has cost you £180 in purchase and up to £180 in maintenance. If you wore it thirty times over that period, the honest cost per wear is £12, not £6.
A more useful version of the formula
Try this instead:
(purchase price + all care costs to date) divided by (actual wears logged)
It is the same shape but with two changes. Care costs are counted honestly. Wears are counted rather than estimated. The number you get back is not a scolding; it is a decision support tool for the next thing you consider buying.
Two numbers worth watching
The first is the median cost per wear across your working wardrobe. Anything above the median is either genuinely occasional (which is fine, an occasion piece should have a higher number), or is being neglected (which is a signal to wear it or move it on).
The second is the ratio of the top-five pieces to the bottom-five. If your top five are wearing themselves to £2 each and your bottom five are stuck at £80 each, you have a wardrobe with a lot of dead weight. Small, unglamorous truth: the fix is usually to buy pieces closer to what you already wear, not to add more variety.
The regret coefficient
This one is not scientific but it is useful. When you look at a piece, ask, on a scale of one to five: how much regret would I feel if I no longer had it? Multiply the cost per wear by that number. Anything with a low regret coefficient and a high cost per wear is a slow lesson about your own buying pattern. Anything with a high regret coefficient and a high cost per wear is a wearing pattern problem, not a shopping problem, and you can solve it by wearing the thing more often.
What FitMatch does with this
We don't want to be the app that scolds you. But we do count your wears in the background, so that at any time you can see the honest picture. The Pro plan includes a quarterly wardrobe report with the median, the extremes, and a nudge toward the pieces that are earning their keep. No shopping suggestions. No affiliate links. Just the numbers.