I heard or read recently that Americans discard clothing after some single-digit number of wears. Maybe seven? I believe there were data on other countries as well. I’d like to find the study that people are getting these numbers from, assuming I didn’t imagine it (although I asked for comments from the peanut gallery and two confirmed reading or hearing something similar.)
Any of you know where these numbers come from? Best I could google was a dailymail article from 2014 about fashion clothes or the like, and UK only.
I found other articles from other sources, but they all ultimately refer back to that completely uncited Daily Mail article, which I cynically assume to mean they’re talking directly out of their ass.
I looked a little more.
#1 That Daily Mail article is terribly written. But I suppose I should expect that level of professionalism from the Daily Mail.
#2 This is as close as I can find to actual data from the study: https://b.barnardos.org.uk/news/media_centre/Once-worn-thrice-shy-8211-British-women8217s-wardrobe-habits-exposed/press_releases.htm?ref=105244
This seems like a reasonable cite for the number of clothing items purchased per year in different countries
The numbers suggest that the average American (male/female/young/old) is buying about 50 clothing items a year. It doesn’t define what an ‘apparel unit’ is, but if it’s just outerwear, then people probably wear on average about 800 - 1000 ‘apparel units’ per year (somewhere between 2 and 3 a day) meaning that the average person wears an average item about 16-20 times before it’s junked.
The number of clothing items a survey would tell you people are purchasing probably goes up a lot if your survey is focused on adult women under retirement age. I think averaging out purchases is more reliable
WSJ: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-high-price-of-fast-fashion-11567096637
I’m assuming that’s the same 2015 study (using that term generously) mentioned elsewhere. And the China statistic, which I thought was from the same source, is from someone else.
No links from WSJ, of course.
Wow.
I have clothes that are 30 years old I’m still using and are in good shape. Of course, I don’t wear them every day, but over three decades the number of times I’ve worn them is comfortably in the double digits.
Those weren’t items I bought second-hand or vintage - I got them new.
Guess that goes along with things like my 20 year old vehicles and 110 year old sewing machine and stuff.
For those who don’t click over, the study was of British women only. It was conducted by a chain of charity stores who were using the results for a campaign to get women to donate their unwanted clothing. Naturally, the article focuses on the lower end numbers to emphasize how many of these items are available. Nothing at all is said of clothing that is worn multiple times.
Some highlights (or lowlights)
I wear everything until it wears out, at which point it gets cut into squares for the Wife’s Swiffer. She prefers cloth instead of the expensive wipes you buy. The only clothing I have every given to thrift stores is items that were real nice but got too small over the years, damn shrinkage! Until a few years ago I still had my team shirt from high school cross country in 1962. We won the state championship that year. Even though I hadn’t tried it on in decades it was falling apart from laying around. Just like me, I suppose!
Dennis
Yeah I think we have a narrow observation being generalized inappropriately by other journalists.
Most of my clothes last for a year or longer of regular use and regular laundering before wearing out (briefs and socks wearing out the fastest), and I’d guess that most get at least a couple dozen wearings, if not more, before reaching that point.
Clothes that I have that don’t get that many wearings are usually gifts that I don’t particularly like, or that don’t fit. Those usually get donated to charity when I clean out my closets.
I’ll also note that I have a Levi’s denim jacket which is about 50 years old, and which I’ve worn regularly for 40 years (it was a hand-me-down from my father). It’s definitely worn around the edges, but I still love it.
My wife and I are almost finished making a quilt for our son using old flowered shirts. These shirts are all cotton, and have become very soft. My son was still in his teens when I wore some of these, and he is in his mid forties now. I use most of my clothes until they are wearing out, although admittedly there are a few of my shirts that don’t get worn much, mostly because they haven’t grown larger with me.
My wife on the other hand has lots of clothes that have certainly been worn less than 5 times. It seems to me that she has more “special occasion” clothes; us older fellows apparently can get away with a few items in those categories…at least that’s my excuse.
I own a suit used only for weddings and funerals. Not too many of those any more. Everything else, I wear till it’s raggy or no longer fits. Some coats last many decades or constant use. What DON’T last are the printed tees I’ve been given, silkscreened with cheap ink that flakes off immediately. Those tees become work shirts till holes gape.
The clothes I wear get worn lots of times. probably dozens of times before they are too worn to keep wearing. But I own a certain number of garments that I’ve never worn, or worn once. There’s the dress my grandmother wanted to buy for me, that I never got altered to fit…There’s the sweater my mother gave me decades ago–I don’t wear sweaters. I dunno, I could probably find more stuff that I don’t wear lying around, and that’s the stuff with sentimental value, there’s also stuff I gave away. (I dump my unwanted clothing in the Goodwill bin, and hope someone else finds it useful.)
And I hate buying clothes. I imagine people who like buying clothes have a lot more stuff like that.
I keep clothing for years. The only things that wear out these days are socks, as I cannot convince myself to buy anything but the cheapest socks (except for thick winter socks). I have a sweater I wore as a teenager (it was too large for me at the time); it has a small hole in the back but I wear it with a coat so there’s no problem there.
The last time I wore something (other than shoes and socks) that wore out was a T-shirt I had to wear to work. They only gave me one, and so it had to be washed every day of for the three months or so I worked there. It developed holes. My shoes used to wear out (I now buy fairly expensive shoes, on the grounds that I really don’t need more than a few pairs) and I haven’t had a jacket with a jammed zipper in more than four years as well.
This link shows 37 “clothing items” purchased by women only in 2016. I need to remember how to log in to see their source.
Like with “units”, I’m not sure about the definition. Is a pair of socks two? I’ll keep digging.
I can log in to that site with my University account. Unfortunately, their source link which goes to some org labelled “Fung Global Retail and Tech” and now appears to be rebranded “Coresight Research” is a dead URL. So no indication of what ‘clothing items’ means in this context. My link seems to suffer from the same problem - link back to the organisation that did the research, but not to the actual research
I am surprised to see that the number of items bought per year appears to be going down according to these guys. This is not what I would have expected!
Other thoughts: It would be dead easy to skew a survey in favour of showing people buying more clothes than the average person actually does (and in fact, that Barnardos survey definitely does one thing in favour of that aim - chooses to survey women specifically. You know you’re going to get a more clickbait-worthy headline that way). If you weren’t paying enough attention, you could even do it by accident - for instance, if you recruit your survey participants by standing outside clothes shops asking people to estimate how many clothes they’ve bought this year, you’ll get four times as many of the people who buy clothes every week, as those who buy clothes once a month.
Found interesting counterpoint to this: Fast fashion is out, second hand is in. And I’d like to take this opportunity to bask in my own virtue 'cos I’m waaaay ahead of that trend, so ha! 
I was trying to figure out what my average is. I have about 1/4 of my wardrobe that gets heavy use (depending on the time of year) and the rest gets very little to only once in a blue moon use. (But even those have ridiculous “lifetimes” so their totals aren’t all that bad.)
Let’s exclude underwear and such. Let’s say I buy 20 shirts, shorts, pants a year. I wear two items in the summer, 3 in the (shorter) winter. Some days I work outside or something so that goes up a bit. Call it at least 1000 "wearings, a year. So if I only wore those 20 things in a year and rotated thru them equally, that’s ~50 wearings. Now, generally the new ones get worn less than that but that brings up the total for older items and it all averages out. (And 20 older items get tossed.)
Average 7? Not for someone like me.
Maybe I should start an IMHO thread, as there seems to be more interest in that than my question.
Sounds interesting. From the title of this I was actually expecting something about how many times something is worn before being washed and was surprised to see it was about discarding clothing.