The new designer clothes bargain - cost per wear

The new designer clothes bargain - cost per wear

January 5th, 2009

If you are lucky/prudent enough to still have some cash, but you know you should do something sensible with it, then you need a whole new range of excuses - sorry, genuine reasons - why you should instead spend it on a new designer Marc Jacobs handbag, or those gorgeous red-soled Christian Louboutin designer heels that you’ve seen.

Obviously the more charitable among us are designer shopping to save the nation from recession. But the rest of you can now fall back on the old “cost per wear” reasoning which is enjoying a bit of a resurgence.

The idea is (not surprisingly) that you may well spend an eye-watering £500 on your designer fashion must-have. But if you wear it a lot, when you work out the cost per wear it becomes surprisingly cheap.

For those of you who failed GCSE Maths, that means dividing the cost by the number of times you wear it. (Presumably we should also factor in the cleaning costs though I suspect that would ruin the numbers. I say this as a rather bemused owner of a pair of Stella McCartney-era Chloe jeans that are dry clean only. Dry clean only jeans? What kind of lifestyle does a designer have, to think that we dry clean our jeans? Does Sir Paul dry clean his jeans? I suspect not.)

Cost per wear does mean you need the money to buy your designer clothing soon-to-be-bargain upfront. It helps if you don’t actually have that many clothes. And I suspect it works better with a lovely designer winter coat, or a Marc Jacobs handbag, than a Vera Wang wedding dress (unless you’re Elizabeth Taylor). This could rule out a whole range of lovely designer fashion things.

So personally I would also add two more excuses:

Cost per compliment - this would work especially well on the Vera Wang wedding dress as you have a captive audience whose sole reason for being there is to tell you that you look fabulous in THAT dress. And you can always seed your wedding guest list with some on-trend fashionistas to up the compliment count. And make sure you have a BIG wedding.

Cost per adoring look - I have a pair of Jimmy Choos designer shoes that I bought in a designer shoe sale. Moss green Mary Janes with a spindly heel, they had 30% off. I have to admit I have only worn them once and they hurt like hell. But I have had three years of getting out the lovely Jimmy Choo shoe box from the wardrobe, taking the Jimmy Choo shoes out of the soft Jimmy Choo shoe bag and gazing at them adoringly. That’s about 50p a look.

So if you want to do some “cost per wear” new season / cruise collection designer shopping, check out:

- and keep those calculators at the ready, girls.