Building up your wardrobe is something that you usually do over many years. As time goes by, you accumulate more and more clothes until the time eventually comes for you to throw some of them out.
But have you ever just stopped and wondered how much all your clothes actually cost you over the years? Many of us never ask that question because clothing is just something we spend on in small amounts here and there. It’s not a big expense, we tell ourselves.
Well, unfortunately, that’s not the case over time. The cost of your wardrobe soon adds up the moment you start summing the RRPs of all the clothes in your drawers.
Some companies are now offering services for you to work out how much you’ve spent on decking out your wardrobe over the years. Watchbox has an article entitled, “What’s your watch worth” while River Island has a wardrobe calculator you can use to tell you how much your entire wardrobe is actually worth. You can then use this information to figure out whether you’re a splurger or a spend-thrift compared to other people. Some people spend a fortune on clothes, while many hardly spend anything at all.
If you want some perspective on this, check out the following fact: The average consumer’s collection of shoes is worth over $5,000. Wow – that’s a lot of money – way more than you’d expect. And that doesn’t include all of the other items in your wardrobe, such as your suits, blazers, dresses and everything else that you own. The total costs can often run into tens of thousands of dollars.
Interestingly, however, most consumers say that they have a wardrobe budget. In other words, they also spend a fixed sum of money on fashion every month and no more than that. But that doesn’t seem to pan out in practice. Many times, we actually forget about small clothing transactions, allowing the numbers to slowly float up over time.
Working out how much your wardrobe is worth is just a bit of fun. But it also shows you just how valuable a wardrobe can be. Who would have thought that it would cost so much money to provide yourself with all the clothes that you need for the week?
You can use this information to turn your wardrobe into an asset. Instead of just assuming that your clothes are yours to keep, you can view them like other designer objects or collectibles. They are a store of value, something that you can pass on to other people when you come to sell them. This way, you can actually reduce the overall cost of your wardrobe versus the rest of your standard of living. Once you’ve had enough of a particular garment, you can put it up for resale and recoup some of your initial spending.
After seeing how much the average wardrobe costs, many of us will be looking for bargains from now on. $5,000-plus is a lot of money to spend on clothes.