Against "Cost Per Wear"

A pro-joy Spyplane Holy Decree

Nov 12, 2024

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First up —

Here at HQ we’re known to literally “get this bread,” in the sense that we cop fresh-baked loaves on the reg. But how to keep a boule or batard tasting its brightest while you work your way through it? For centuries, people have turned to linen bread bags to get the job done. So earlier this year we hit up the linen-garment-crafting Spyfriends at NYC’s Blluemade to see if they wanted to develop one with us…

They whipped up a prototype, we tested & refined it, and the result is dropping in a very small batch this Thursday, hand-stamped with a flax & wheat line-drawing design that I (Jonah) whipped up here at HQ.

The bags are made in NYC from undyed linen woven from rare Belgian flax in the small town of Meulebeke at the Libeco mill — a family-owned operation, founded in 1858, with official “Masters of Linen” certification. Perfect for your kitchen, perfect as a gift, too. Full details will be in Thursday’s sletter. 🧺🧺🧺

Meanwhile…

Blackbird Spyplane is known and celebrated as one of the most non-doctrinaire style & culture sletters across all media. Magnanimous. Non-judgmental. But also? We are wise and infallible, to the degree that people are always asking us to “cut through the lies, mystifications and confusions of this topsy-turvy hustle-bustle modern world — and draw some lines in the d*mn sand.”

So on rare occasions we descend from Mount Spynai like “Swag Moses” … to issue a righteous Spyplane Holy Decree.

Today’s decree builds on thoughts we’ve expressed here and there in the sletter before: Cost Per Wear — the thing where people divide the price of a garment by the number of times they wear it, in an effort to assess and/or demonstrate its “true value” — is a misguided and joyless way to think about clothes.

“Yes, this sweater cost $400 but I’ve already worn it 7 days in a row, so now I’m paying a mere $57 per Span of Life Clothed in This Garment. I only have to wear it 6 more weeks, total, as long as I’m alive, before that drops to a mere $8 a wear. If I wear it 8 weeks…”

Friend — do you hear yourself? Are you a sauce lord talking about a slapper, or are you a tax adjuster talking about an amortized asset, baby?

The ostensible appeal of Cost Per Wear is that it helps you to stop thinking about the incalculable, protean allure of a garment and focus, instead, on matters of concrete, empirical value. The big problem is that the best things about rocking clothes — the feelings of pleasure, happiness, swag, sentimental association, danger, hotness, etc., that you feel while moving through the world clothed in a banger — are simply not “empiricizable!”

People tend to only calculate C.P.W. when they’re talking about expensive clothes, i.e. cases where you’re trying to convince yourself to cop something big-ticket, or you’re trying to make yourself feel better about having already splashed out, or you’re someone who sells clothes, trying to persuade a customer to pull the trigger. No one really talks about C.P.W. in the context of, say, a sick $10 thrift-store find, because the value there is self-evident, no mental gymnastics required.

Imagine, however, that you buy an expensive suit or dress and only bust it out on average ~2.4x a year — but you do so at super dope celebrations of life where you dance to great music, stance the f**k up with friends and loved ones, get drunk off beautiful vibes, generally feel like a pimp, etc. And now imagine that instead of a very expensive special-occasion garment it’s just a very expensive top-tier button-up or pair of pants that, for whatever reason, you wear sparingly, but whenever you do, similar feelings of euphoric pimpishness course through you.

What does Cost Per Wear have to tell you in those kinds of cases about the much more important metric of joy?

My impression is that Cost Per Wear mindset is especially big in women’s handbag discourse. I think I personally first came across it in ’00s menswear-era selvedge-denim discourse. What bags and jeans have in common is that they’re things you could actually plausibly wear every day, so they blur the line between an extravagant flight of fancy and a functional “utility player.”

But C.P.W. Mindset has expanded to where people apply it to all kinds of clothes and accessories — and things get goofy fast.

A few weeks ago there was a run of textbook transitional fall days here in California: highs in the low 60s, mix of sun and clouds, cold and windy in the shade and yet hot as hell in the direct glare of 🌞Father Helios🌞. I went out for a long walk in my new 1/2-zip Rier pullover. It’s a beautiful $910 (!) garment that I first wrote about here in the sletter back in February, and finally said, “F**k it, this thing is fantastic, real copper s**t, let’s go,” when I tried it on at NYC’s coolest new shop last month.

The point here is it’s a piece I love with a hard-to-ignore price tag. And during this long walk I got alternately way too hot and way too cold, over and over, so I kept taking off the fleece and stuffing it in a tote, only to yank it out and pull it back on 10 minutes later when the clouds thickened and/or the wind whipped back up and shivered my timbers again. By the third or fourth cycle, I realized I was driving down the “Cost Per Wear” each time I pulled on the fleece. Yes! As my walk progressed, the more financially prudent the purchase became.

If that sounds like inane sophistry to you, that’s because “Cost Per Wear” is, at root, inane sophistry!

To be fair, there is a kernel of logic at play. If you buy a $910 garment and never wear it, it can be convincingly argued that you wasted that $910. But C.P.W. seizes on this kernel, inverts it, and then extrapolates it into absurdity. The more you wear a garment, the thinking goes, the closer you come to wasting zero dollars on it and… somehow winding up back in the black, value-wise??

I’ll also grant that when someone invokes C.P.W. they might be making an implicit and valid secondary point about how a bigger price-tag often correlates to better quality and greater durability, a.k.a. the actual material potential for more enjoyment over a greater period of time. I feel this: You experienced all this stress about shelling out a bunch of $$, but look at you now, years later, still swaddled in a beloved slapper you’ve worn a bunch and feel fire in every time, and you’ve even bought other pieces because they look good with it, and you wear those all the time, too — joy begetting joy exponentially. It’s a lovely vision.

So just say that and skip the detour through C.P.W. arithmetic! Because copping cool pants is not the same thing as copping an “AMC Stubs” pass, an Unlimited Monthly Special at the car wash, or any other “Use it x times and it pays for itself”-type deal.

Those are pricing schemes deployed by movie chains and car-wash managers to get you to give them more money for their products and services than you normally would have, their assumption being that while outliers will use the membership to the fullest, most people will more than make up for those outliers over time by using the membership sporadically, if at all.

Is your relationship to clothes-copping so stunted that you would inflict that kind of pricing scheme on yourself? Is your relationship to putting that s**t on so anhedonic that you would turn the act of rocking a slapper into an ongoing accounting task?

Even more to the point: Is your faith in your own enthusiasm for a garment so wobbly that you need to buttress & leverage it with spurious math? It’s not exactly the same as the joyless business of garment arbitrage we’ve called Cursed Liquid Asset Portfolio (C.L.A.P.) Mindset, but it’s a close relative.

How about this instead? If you love a piece of clothing, if you have a reasonable expectation that you will feel like the man (in the gender-agnostic sense) wearing it, and if you can afford it, then consider copping it. If you don’t and/or can’t, leave it uncopped. Our pathologies around the acquisition of new clothes are twisted enough as it is. No need to invent “rational” financial instruments and tangle ourselves up in them, too!

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