I’ve tracked every piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years

I&#x27;ve done the same lifehack for many years now and it&#x27;s been extraordinarily helpful. On Jan 1st or 2nd, I rotate all of my hangers so the hook is backwards on the bar (I do something similar for shoes, folded pants, etc.). The next Jan 1st or 2nd, any clothes that are still in that position are given away. It means I made it through 4 seasons, and 52 weeks of work, play, social functions, hiking, yard work, house maintenance, and other events and never needed to call on those clothes. So off they go.<p>The first year I did this I probably gave away about 60% of my wardrobe and never missed a single item I parted with -- a number of which still had the store tags on them. Even though this frees me up to purchase new clothes as I need them throughout the year without filling my closet up to the breaking point, I find that it puts a small routine in the back of my mind that makes me far more frugal with clothes and as a result I buy very little. If I <i>really</i> need some specialty clothing for something, it&#x27;s usually a tuxedo or something I can probably rent or borrow.<p>It&#x27;s sort of a zero effort, self-documenting, positional tracking system.

&gt; <i>The 90 euro Converse sneakers and the 30 euro Mywears have a similar CPW (...). In this case, money buys quality, at least when measured by durability. (...) The more expensive sneakers, the 150 euro Diesels, perform remarkably worse than the two aforementioned. (...) In this case, money does not seem to buy quality, at least not durability.</i><p>This is the part that it&#x27;s infuriating to me: I would willingly pay more if I knew which items are of good quality, but quite often there is no way to tell. One would assume that price is a proxy for quality, but (as seen here) this is rarely so: yes, the quality item is probably more expensive, but you can also easily buy items that are both expensive and bad.

He gets less than 30 uses per shirt and considers that a good number?<p>I wear a shirt that many times in a year, and they last many years.<p>Granted, my shirts probably aren&#x27;t as fancy as his and don&#x27;t cost as much, but that&#x27;s even more reason to be horrified.

This is very fascinating, and it’s exactly the kind of data I wish I could have “for free” for my own life. But:<p>&gt; Underwear shirts typically last between 20 and 25 times.<p>This person must have very different wear standards from me, as I would guess my “underwear” shirts last 50+ wears over many years. Although I don’t wear those often, so I admit I may be overestimating how many wears they face.<p>FWIW it’s also about how many <i>washes</i> they face. It’s good to wear clothes more than once per wash, assuming light wear and they aren’t smelly, because washing wears them out a lot more than wearing them does.<p>&gt; But my shirts stand out in a league of their own. I spend 751 euros on shirts yearly. Do you recall my costly affection to high quality shirts? Well, here it shows.<p>Ok now I know this person lives in a different world from me :)<p>I do really agree about buying for quality and thinking in terms of cost per wear.<p>I’ve had great luck with Mack Weldon for t-shirts and undershirts. I especially like the “silver” fabric t-shirts, and I can confidently say I’m getting &gt; 50 wears off these given how long I’ve had mine and how often I wear them. They do eventually wear thinner and looser, but have not developed any tears or holes. And, specifically the silver fabric is amazing in how fresh and clean it always smells. You really can wear it 4-5 times, you only need to wash it when it eventually gets stains.

It&#x27;s a fine balance. Buying too cheap clothing, and you&#x27;ll drive into problems like terrible patterns, poor fabrics, etc.<p>Buying too expensive clothes, and you&#x27;ll drive into problems like outrageous brand-name surcharges, fabrics which may be <i>too</i> fine.<p>I have yet to find a perfectly fine one-stop shop for all my clothes, so I rather focused on finding the best I could with my own criteria in mind. Online shopping has made this a breeze, if the clothes are consistent in size and quality. Websites like yoox, lyst, etc. make it possible to purchase high quality and dollar items, to very good prices.

TIL: there are men who own 15 pairs of shoes and 15 belts <i>mostly over a three year time span</i>. I&#x27;m pretty sure I haven&#x27;t owned 15 belts in my whole life, nor 15 pairs of shoes since I left college, and I&#x27;m in my early 40&#x27;s...<p>Not judging, to each his own, I just wonder if I&#x27;m the outlier or if he is.

One way to make your clothes last longer is by checking to see how often you&#x27;re supposed to wash them, and air drying them if possible. Things like jeans really only need to be washed a couple of times a year unless you&#x27;re spilling stuff on them or being very active and sweaty in them. Growing up, the conventional wisdom was that you always had to wash something after it was worn once, and you were being a slob if you didn&#x27;t (for some reasons hoodies were exempt), but it turns out that isn&#x27;t true.

There’s another axis of quality, which is ethical: how is a given piece of clothing sourced and manufactured? I sometimes end up with clothing that fits poorly – especially in t-shirts – that I chose because of the sourcing story, even though I’m dubious about the impact of voting with my meager few dollars.<p>On a completely different topic, I have discovered that the clothes dryer has a similar impact on the lifespan of clothes that smoking does on people. If you can manage, hanging your clothes to dry – for example, over the back of a chair or whatever – will make them last longer, though I’m not sure if it’s the heat or the spinning that does the damage. (I’ve been trying to dry things on low heat for longer, but I’m not sure if that helps and I’m too lazy to put together a spreadsheet like this person.)

I&#x27;m the author of this post, Olof. There are many brilliant points and questions in these discussions. Since I would love to understand different views, experiences and questions, I&#x27;ll promise to answer any and all questions you might have.<p>So if of interest, ask me anything! :)<p>I&#x27;m in Helsinki (GMT +2), so sorry about the latency that might cause.

It&#x27;s interesting that he highlights and bolds &quot;tracking this takes less than a minute a day&quot;, when the project takes up such a substantial amount of his mental real estate. It seems fitting that a man so interested in tracking numbers would miss the untrackable, arguably more important, items (e.g. freedom from mental encumbrances).

I am really not a choosy person in this matter, and to reduce toll of selection, I have a simple habit of using only two pairs of clothes, I wear them alternatively. When at home I use loose cotton pants and undershirt. For washing, I wash my under-garments daily and my shirts&#x2F;pants after one-three uses based on season, in summer its daily wash and in winter its 2-3. My cloths on average lasts 4-5 months and under-garments 2 months.

I believe if you religiously optimise for cost per wear you will end up wearing a hiking outfit everyday.

Interesting, but biased to expensive clothing. There is very cheap clothing as well, like Primark, where you can get a shirt for a few €, some of which I’ve owned for very long

I love the graphic on the article, it brings me back to playing solitaire on windows 95!

When I lived in SF I didn&#x27;t buy clothing except for socks and underwear. I only needed to visit a tech campus and I was stocked for the next year. I even have a pair of socks from Gusto I still wear.<p>These days I live in Europe and getting desperate. Before Covid the occasional trip back to Cali allowed me to restock. I even went and BOUGHT clothes from Macy&#x27;s.<p>tldr; VAT and cultural norms make clothing disproportionately expensive.

And there were zero, because who would wear the same clothes for 3 years.

Why does anyone need six pairs of white sneakers? I have two pairs of shoes: one for the warm half of the year, and one for the cold&#x2F;rainy half of the year (with a flexible definition of &quot;half&quot;). Then I have a pair of flip-flops and my &quot;good Sunday shoes&quot; which get dusted off very rarely when I have to wear a suit.