What are you really paying for in a dress?

Co-founder Vaida Vai of Womenswear brand Le Slap, discusses the true cost of a dress.

We live in a world where people can spend more money on a cup of coffee than a piece of clothing.

And what is mass production? An opportunity to look fashionable for an affordable price or just a waste of money? Mass production aka fast fashion sells affordable collections that are mainly based on designs you see at Fashion Week. Fast fashion (think Zara or H&M) produces many more collections than an average brand and this has an enormous environmental footprint for its production and disposal.

Speaking of fast fashion quality, have you noticed how quickly clothes get torn or what happens after it gets washed? Yes, the quality isn’t always there. And this forces us to buy more and more. 

Yet, it was not always this way: did you hear your grandparents saying they wore pants for 50 years or they still have the same shoes from their young days? Statistically, we buy 5 times more clothing than we used to in the 1980s and its mainly because of quality.

Often we see a dress priced at 50 pounds we feel happy that we found it at an affordable price but do you consider the quality and the number of times you will be able to wear it?

From my experience of working many years in the fashion industry and now being a co-founder of a fashion brand Le SLAP (@leslapofficial), I can see that the quality of garments is worse than in the past decades and people who are buying into cheaper options actually end up spending more on fashion due to the lack of quality. That is one of the ways fast fashion companies promote consumerism. 

For instance, here at Le SLAP we use 3x more thread to enhance sustainability of an item compared to high street fashion brands that attempt to optimize product costs by sacrificing product quality. As another example, Le SLAP uses metal zippers which last long vs plastic ones often used by high street fashion brands that break quickly.

SO THE REAL QUESTION IS NOT WHAT IS THE PRICE OF A DRESS, BUT WHAT IS THE PRICE TO WEAR THIS DRESS 1 TIME (HOW MANY TIMES CAN YOU WEAR IT ON AVERAGE)?

Let’s calculate the real value of a fashion item. Firstly, looking to statistics on an average high-quality piece of clothing is used 10x more than poor-quality garments. So, the true value of an item should be calculated looking at the price of how much does it cost to wear an item one time on average rather than just the purchase price. If the dress is priced at 60 pounds and you only wear it 3 times, a one-time wear price is 20 pounds. On the other hand, if you consume consciously check the quality and invest into a 200 pounds dress, which you can wear 30times on average one-time wear price is just 6.6 pounds.

So, if you calculate by the rule of one-time average wear price, the 200-pound dress is actually three times less expensive that the 60 pound one. Plus, you can always re-sell it and get some of your money back.

 Written by Vaida Vai from Le Slap. Shop HERE.