Why I Buy Expensive Clothes (and Don't Try to Convince You to Too)

While researching my article about navy trousers and tonal gravity, I fell down a proper rabbit hole. I only meant to check whether anyone else had written about an idea I'd come up with for myself. They had. But along the way I ran into questions that nobody in our bubble seriously discusses any more. They aren't up for debate; they're entry-level dogma, like the advice to buy a navy blazer. By now my brain skips over those questions entirely. It's automatic. I don't even look at clothes from certain brands. When I come across a new brand, I check whether it meets a few quality standards I consider the minimum. If it doesn't, I don't look any further. I don't weigh it up and reject it. I filter it out before it even enters the picture.

One of those unasked questions is this: why does the bubble buy quality in the first place? We might just as easily have no particular taste for high quality. Why does nobody say, buy as cheaply as you can and replace it when it breaks, so you'll always have the cooler, newer thing? Novelty really is one of the strongest reasons people buy clothes. People in the bubble are forever buying new things they don't need, too, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Nobody preaches taking it as far as it will go, though. So does quality matter for its own sake? Or is this one enormous circlejerk of people telling each other quality matters because they themselves were taught that it matters, when underneath it all it doesn't actually matter a damn?

Looking for an answer, I came across a trilemma. Broadly speaking, there are three positions on this question.

Position one: substance first

Quality is real and you can feel it. In comfort, in how well-made a garment feels, against your skin and in the way the fabric ages. It comes from good cloth and good workmanship.

Let's be honest, you can't just brush that aside. One minimum requirement goes unchallenged in the menswear bubble: buy natural fibres rather than synthetics. The reason is simple. Natural fibres have a baseline level of quality and properties that the usually much cheaper synthetics, polyester, acrylic and the rest, don't have. Even a lower-grade natural fibre makes a difference to comfort. There isn't much more to say about it. Anyone who has worn a plastic suit knows it's rubbish.

Position two: style beats quality

I'm only half sold on this position. Or rather, it depends. The argument goes: quality is overrated, styling will always beat an expensive suit. Simon Crompton is one of the people making this point, and many others have been saying much the same thing for years: "Can you look good in cheap clothes? Absolutely... style is always more important." Good fit matters more than good quality.

That's true if you pit the extremes against each other. If a suit doesn't fit, you can see that it doesn't fit, and its price no longer matters. But is that a fair comparison? No. Each of those two things has a minimum standard a garment has to meet before it's even in contention. Fall below the minimum on either one and you're out, however well you do on the other. An expensive suit that's three sizes too big is out. A cheap suit that fits beats it, sure. But it still loses to a good suit that fits.

This position is a guide to getting the most from your money, and it makes sense on those terms: if you can't afford the good suit that fits, take the poor one that fits over the good one that doesn't. Crompton isn't wrong. You can't stop at saying fit beats quality, though. The version with two separate measures and a minimum for each is more accurate. That's what he means, even if he doesn't put it that way.

Honestly, positions one and two aren't even having much of an argument. They're different ways of weighting the same thing, a preference. Nobody calls you stupid for caring a bit more about fit than fibre. It's the third position that threatens the whole game.

Position three: it's all status anyway

Then there's the third position, which pulled the ground from under my feet for a few seconds. The status cynic says quality is just an excuse. What matters is looking expensive, and the social and cultural capital that expensive fabrics buy you within the bubble. This take comes from the Prep Club: "The actual material quality of our garments probably has very little bearing on why we've spent so much money." On that account, my enthusiasm for quality would be a post-purchase rationalisation. I tell myself I spent all that money because the product is so good, when what I really wanted was the status my bubble attaches to it.

For a moment I thought: oof. Is this whole thing that shallow?

Three seconds of panic. Then the reflex arrived, and honestly my first thought was a concession: yes, of course. I buy certain brands and products because somewhere along the way I learned that they carry status. People certainly buy status first and foremost. Everyone does.

And right after that came the comeback, which sounded clever at first: if you're buying status anyway, you might as well buy good quality with it. Then at least you get to enjoy the status you bought for longer.

That comeback sounds suspiciously like proof

But that comeback is exactly the sort of thing I'd immediately call bullshit if I heard it from someone else. I think those arguments that sound scientific, "a study found that people in suits earn X more over their lifetimes", are bullshit. Turning the status argument around follows the same pattern. It makes sense at first, but only because of where I'm standing. That's why it's so easy for me to believe it.

Because at heart, all of this becomes interchangeable and arbitrary when you change the frame. If I'd been born in the Amazon rainforest, I probably wouldn't be doing this. If I'd been born in North Korea, I wouldn't either. If I hadn't moved to Bonn ten years ago, I wouldn't. None of that is a profound insight. But it's enough to see that there is no objective proof you ought to care about clothes. And I'm not going to sell you one.

What it comes down to instead

I do this because I've had good experiences with it. If my experiences had been bad, I wouldn't have found any pleasure in it and I wouldn't be sharing my enthusiasm. That's all there is to it. They're only my experiences; they're not trying to convince you. I just think other people can have experiences like them, or I wouldn't share them.

Even the status you attach to a brand is, when you look more closely, tied to experience. Something once gave you a positive connection to that brand, to a particular kind of garment. And there are also people who reject ties or think men in suits are arseholes because they once had a bad experience with some man in a suit. Does that mean men in suits are arseholes? No, absolutely not, not even a little. It says something about that one experience. And positive experiences work the same way as negative ones.

You can see the reverse happening out in the world. Daniel at @ivyarchivemunich has pointed it out several times: people fiercely defend the highest standard of quality they've personally experienced so far. Some men defend the shirts from a well-known entry-level brand tooth and nail as soon as someone suggests there's something better. And they're not wrong. They're defending the best experience they've had, because those are probably the best shirts they've owned so far. They can't imagine how a better shirt would feel. Even if they had one in the wardrobe, the new experiences would first have to displace the old ones. I'm no exception. The filter I described at the start is the same mechanism, just a few steps further along.

And you know this mechanism even if clothes mean nothing to you. Think of a pair of scissors. A kitchen knife. A pair of shoes, a bicycle. Once you've owned a high-quality version of something, you quickly learn to appreciate it. I've come to believe that this pattern holds across practically every product category: you get most of the quality by a certain price point, and that first jump in quality is incredibly easy to feel. Beyond that, you either have a particular need arising from your own circumstances or, eventually, it becomes an enthusiast's pursuit, a bit of a game. A 60 to 100 square metre flat is enough for most people. If you have ten children, you need more, and if you want 300 square metres, by all means have it. But the jump I'm talking about is the first one: from the thing that frustrates you to the thing that works. That experience is real. No bubble talked you into it.

Why it still has to be quality

If it's about good experiences, the question remains: what keeps giving me one?

A cheap keepsake holds one memory in place. The souvenir, the trip. After that it just hangs there. A well-made piece adds another memory every time you wear it, because it feels good each time, fits properly and does something you can feel even if nobody cares or notices. The attachment itself has nothing to do with quality; you can be just as attached to a band T-shirt. But the good piece keeps adding to it for decades, while the band T-shirt has long since worn out. That way the associations you've collected are better preserved.

By the way, I nearly left that point out, and I should admit why: material and workmanship haven't been an issue for me for a long time. Fit matters more to me now. That's exactly why I underestimate how much the difference matters to someone standing where I stood ten years ago.

And yes, the good piece ages better too. A great coat was great fifty years ago and will still be great in fifty years. Leather jacket, same story. Cordovan loafers were probably great in the sixties and still are, and I can't see that changing. You can rule out in advance the things that have no chance of ageing well, poor quality and very trendy stuff, and it's only between those extremes that you have any chance of getting it right. But I've talked elsewhere about which pieces those are and how you can recognise them.

You don't have to earn your taste

It's okay to say, look, this is our hobby and I want to share my enthusiasm. It's a very important part of my life, and of many other people's lives. In the grand scheme of things it's also pretty unimportant compared with, I don't know, medical research. That's a question of scale, nothing more. You don't have to make it smaller than it is. You just have to see it in the context where it matters.

So: you're allowed to like things because you've had good experiences with them. You don't need a study to justify that. I'm sharing enthusiasm here, not proof. I can't give you those experiences; you have to have them yourself. But maybe I can show you where to look so you can start enjoying it more, sooner. If you share my enthusiasm, lovely. If you don't, that's fine too.

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