The orphan garment is the most expensive thing you own

Dividing rather than comparing

The price on a garment is the least useful number attached to it. What matters is the price divided by the number of wearings you get, and that ratio can differ by two orders of magnitude between two things bought on the same afternoon for the same money.

A coat worn four days a week for six winters is being divided by a very large number. A jacket bought for a specific occasion and worn twice is being divided by two. The second one may well have cost a quarter of the first at the till, and it will still be the more expensive garment.

This is not an argument for buying expensive things. It is an argument for noticing that the sum has a denominator, and that almost all the variation lives there rather than in the price.

What makes a garment an orphan

An orphan is a garment that combines with nothing you own. It hangs there, it is perfectly good, and it never comes out, because wearing it would require buying something else to go with it — which is how one orphan sometimes produces a second.

They are created in fairly predictable ways. A garment bought on its own, away from the rest of the wardrobe, with no clear idea of what it will be worn with. A garment bought at the end of a season because the price had dropped. A colour or a pattern that is striking in isolation and compatible with very little.

The most common route, though, is buying for a life you do not have. Clothes for an imagined version of your week — more formal, more sociable, more outdoors — are bought sincerely and worn rarely, because the week does not change to accommodate them.

Where cost per wear misleads

The measure is genuinely useful and it is also frequently abused, usually in the shop, as a justification for spending more. The trick is that the denominator is a forecast, and forecasts made while holding something you want are unreliable.

It also flattens differences that matter. A cheap garment worn two hundred times has a low cost per wear and may have been uncomfortable for most of them. A garment can be worn constantly out of resignation rather than preference, and the arithmetic does not know the difference.

And it says nothing about timing. Spending a large sum once is not equivalent to spending it in instalments, whatever the eventual total works out at, and any advice that ignores whether the money is available is not advice about clothes.

The versatility test at the point of purchase

The practical version of all this is a question to ask while the garment is still in the shop: name three things you already own that this goes with, and one occasion in the next fortnight when you would wear it. If you cannot do both, you are looking at a likely orphan, whatever the price.

A second question is worth adding for anything expensive. Would you buy this at full price if it were not reduced? A discount changes the numerator of the sum and has no effect whatever on the denominator, and a great many orphans enter a wardrobe through a sale.

The third is about maintenance, which is usually left out of the calculation entirely. A garment that must be dry-cleaned after every second wearing carries an ongoing cost that a machine-washable one does not, and over years that can exceed what the garment cost.

What to do with the ones you already have

The first option is to make an orphan combine, which sometimes takes a single deliberate purchase. If a jacket needs one particular colour of trouser to work, and that trouser is something you would wear anyway with other things, buying it converts a dead garment into a live one and adds combinations elsewhere too. That is a good trade.

The second is to move it on. There is a sunk cost trap here that catches everyone: the money is gone whether the garment hangs in the wardrobe or not, and keeping it costs space and a small amount of guilt every time you look at it. Selling, giving or donating recovers something and clears the rail.

The third is to be honest about the ones you keep for reasons that have nothing to do with wearing them. Some garments are kept because of who gave them or where they were bought, and that is a legitimate reason to own an object. It is just worth filing them as keepsakes rather than as clothes, so the wardrobe you are actually choosing from each morning is the one that works.