Cost Per Wear: What Your Unworn Clothes Reveal About Your Leadership Presence

Somewhere in your wardrobe there is a piece with the tags still on. Research suggests it has company: one survey found the average woman reports 21 per cent of her wardrobe as unwearable and has never removed the tags from 12 per cent of it. For a professional wardrobe of 150 to 200 pieces, that can mean 20 to 35 items that have never been worn, holding thousands of dollars between them.

Cost per wear is the simple formula made famous again by the girl math trend: the price of a garment divided by the number of times you wear it. Used the usual way, it justifies buying. Worn often enough, almost anything becomes good value.

Used the other way, on the wardrobe you already own, the formula becomes an audit, and the audit tends to surface something leaders rarely expect. The unworn pieces are less about discipline than about evolution. Roles change, levels change, lives change, and a wardrobe keeps a record of every version of you that made a purchase along the way. The dress bought on holiday for a life that stayed at the resort, or the blazer bought for an old idea of a role, made sense to the person who bought them. When your leadership has moved faster than your wardrobe, the mismatch appears as unworn clothing, cluttered mornings and decision fatigue before the day has begun.

For leaders that morning cost is the real one. Attention spent sorting through pieces that belong to other lives is attention unavailable for the room you are about to walk into.

The full article walks through the audit itself: how to count, what to ask of every piece with the tags still on, what to do with the answer, and the one question to run before any new piece comes home.

Read the full article on Substack: https://sonyachoilarosa.substack.com/p/the-tags-are-still-on