£80 feels sensible. £240 feels expensive. Price tags make that comparison easy, and almost useless.

The better question is: how many times will you actually wear this? That's cost per wear, the number that tells you what something really costs. £240 worn 200 times comes to £1.20 a wear. £80 worn four times before it's forgotten comes to £20. The tag was lying.

Why cheap isn't always good value

Most of us have bought something that felt like a win at the till. It didn't quite fit. It didn't layer well. It didn't feel like us. It got worn once, maybe twice, then it sat in the wardrobe until it went to a charity bag or a resale app.

That's not affordable. It's waste, financially and otherwise. A piece only becomes good value once it's part of your routine, not once it's off the hanger.

Buying for repetition

Once you start thinking in cost per wear, your buying changes. You look for pieces that work across seasons, that layer easily, that don't depend on a trend to look right, and that improve rather than degrade with age. You stop buying for a moment and start buying for years.

This is the logic behind a capsule wardrobe: fewer pieces, each one used often enough that its true cost keeps falling the longer you own it.

Doing the maths

You don't need a spreadsheet. A rough estimate is enough: guess how many times you'll realistically wear something over its lifetime, then divide the price by that number. A coat worn twice a week for eight winters is a different purchase to the same coat worn twice, ever.

It's why we built the Capsule Original Trench the way we did: heavyweight cotton, proper construction, designed to be worn for decades rather than a season. The price on the label reflects that. So does the cost per wear, eventually.

The short version

Stop asking what something costs. Ask what it costs every time you wear it. That single change is most of what you need to buy a better wardrobe, with fewer regrets and less waste.