How long should clothes last?
Nobody agrees, and that is the problem

The only place I know where the lifespan of a garment is written down as a binding number is a dry cleaner’s claims table. The International Fair Claims Guide, approved as an American standard in 1988, exists so that when a cleaning job goes wrong, the payout can be depreciated against the years your coat had left. Most clothes, it reckons, live two to three years. So the one enforceable answer to “how long should clothes last” was written four decades ago, to settle damage claims. Nobody else commits to a number. Not the industry, not the researchers, not yet the regulators. And that missing number is not trivia. It decides what a brand can promise, what you can check before you pay, and whether “built to last” means anything at all.

Pick a number, any number

The figure you will meet most often is 2,2 years, the estimated average life of a UK garment from WRAP’s Valuing Our Clothes report of 2012. It has been quoted for fourteen years as if someone had measured it. Nobody had. WRAP’s own 2017 follow-up discloses that the 2012 lifetime “was assumed”, imported from EU-level modelling. That 2017 report then asked British consumers directly and arrived at 3,3 years, and in the very next sentence warned that the two figures were produced by different methods and are not comparable. Both are still in circulation: WRAP’s current advice pages carry the 2,2 from 2012, while its 2017 report says 3,3.

Academic fieldwork lands somewhere else again. Kirsi Laitala and Ingun Grimstad Klepp, the Oslo researchers who have done more wardrobe fieldwork than anyone, surveyed 53.461 garments across five countries in 2020 and estimated an expected lifespan of around 5,2 years and roughly 80 wears per garment.

So: 2,2 years, or 3,3, or 5,2. None of this is sloppiness. Each number answers a differently phrased question about a different population of clothes, which is precisely the problem, because a benchmark that can be restated to mean anything is not a benchmark.

The unit decides the answer

Lifespan sounds like one quantity. It is at least four: years on the rail, times worn, times washed, number of owners. They move independently, and the rankings flip depending on which one you pick.

Laitala and Klepp’s data makes the point cleanly. A garment with one owner averages 94 wears across 5,3 years. Give it a second owner and the years more than double, to 12,7, but the wears rise less than half, to 137. Passing a garment on doubles its life in one unit and barely extends it in another.

In the freshest study I have read, published in January 2026 in Cleaner and Responsible Consumption, researchers sat in the wardrobes of 160 Flemish adults and found a T-shirt for everyday use is kept about four years and worn 33 times. The same T-shirt bought for formal occasions is kept five years and worn nine times. An everyday coat: five years, 136 wears, almost never washed. In Laitala and Klepp’s models, with everything else held equal, suits stay in the wardrobe about three and a half years longer than socks and are worn roughly 38 times less. So which garment lasts longest? Pick your unit, pick your winner. That is why every “average garment lifespan” you have ever read disagrees with the next one, and why none of them can carry the weight we keep putting on them.

What we reach for instead: the price tag

In the absence of a real benchmark, shoppers use the one number every garment carries. In a University of Otago study from 2020, 78% of consumers surveyed agreed that with clothing you get what you pay for. Yet the same study laundered T-shirts across price points and concluded that retail price cannot be used as an indicator of durability.

Then last year the test was run at scale. WRAP and the Leeds Institute of Textiles and Colour put 47 T-shirts from the UK market through 50 cycles of washing and tumble-drying and graded them on pilling, colour, shrinkage and shape. Price had no correlation with the result. The most expensive shirt, at 395£, ranked 28th of 47. A 4£ shirt ranked 15th. The most durable of all cost 28£. What did predict the outcome was the cloth itself: heavier cottons beat lighter ones, and four of the ten most durable shirts were pure cotton.

I want to be careful here, because the tempting conclusion is the wrong one. Cheap clothes are not doomed to fall apart. Polyester is a tough fibre, and I own fast-fashion pieces that have outlived far more expensive ones. The honest reading is that at every price, durability is left to chance rather than designed in and declared. A price says where a brand sits in the market. It says nothing about the seams. (I wrote about what the fast and ultra-fast models actually optimise for separately.)

The number that is coming

Brussels has noticed the vacuum. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, in force since 18.07.2024, puts durability first on the list of things future product rules must improve, and clothing is in the first wave, with the textile rules expected from 2027 and applying about eighteen months later. The scientists preparing them are refreshingly blunt about the starting point. There is, the Commission’s Joint Research Centre wrote in its 2024 preparatory study, “no common approach to assess or guarantee the physical durability of textile apparel”.

Read the fine print, though, and the coming number is not the one you might hope for. What is on the table is a laboratory floor: garments grouped by category, aged through a set number of standardised wash cycles, then required to pass thresholds for pilling, shrinkage and seam strength. Useful, and long overdue. But the JRC itself warns that a wash-cycle count “should not be confused with its service lifespan”, and WRAP argued in 2025 that the thresholds being discussed, in the range of 15 to 20 washes where people expect up to 50, are too lenient to drive real environmental improvement. France, which moved first with an environmental-cost label in 2025 and an ultra-fast-fashion law in July 2026, defines the clothing it penalises by proxies, the flood of new styles and the weakness of repair incentives, without ever saying how long a garment should live. Even the lawmakers penalising short-lived fashion will not put a number on it.

The other side

The strongest objection is that a single number would mislead, and it is a good objection. A sock and a wool coat are not comparable products. Use intensity varies by owner more than by garment. And most clothes do not die of weakness anyway: across seventeen studies of why garments leave use, reviewed by Laitala and Klepp in 2022, wear and tear was the biggest single reason at around 37%, which means almost two thirds of garments go for other reasons. Fit, taste, boredom. Design researcher Kate Fletcher put it best in 2017: making a garment last is very different from making a long-lasting garment. Build an indestructible dress nobody wants to wear in year three and you have added impact, not saved it. There is even a cautionary tale on file: the one place Europe already fixed a standard wears assumption, the Product Environmental Footprint, is the place SIFO researchers argue the modelling ended up favouring exactly the fibres and business models it was meant to check.

All of that is true, and none of it argues for the status quo. Not one of those critics wants no benchmark. They want several correct ones, set per category and honest about their unit. The scandal is not that a universal number is impossible. It is that for decades the answer has been left at “it depends”, and “it depends” has been doing a lot of convenient work.

Where that leaves us

My answer, for what it is worth: think in wears, per category. Years flatter the coat that hangs untouched. Wears are the unit in which a garment earns its place. When I look at a piece now, the question I ask is not “how many years will this last” but “how many wears will this take, and what will fail first”. A seam I can see, a fibre line I can read, a fabric weight I can feel: that is the durability information that exists today.

And the wardrobe research carries one more finding worth sitting with: the same type of wool jumper has been documented at a single wear and at more than 400. The garment sets the ceiling. The owner decides how much of that ceiling gets used, wear by wear and wash by wash. I have written a whole guide on how to care for clothes so they last, because that half is yours. The EU’s laboratory floors will arrive around 2028. The claims table settled on two to three years because somebody had to pay out. Until a better number exists, the count that matters is the one only you can keep.