Point About the Financials of Streetwear: The Liquidity of your Clothes

Disclaimer: I'm no expert in anything - I'm only 2 years into an economics degree, I just wanted to bring up a point that a lot of people forget. Also, this is probably going to be LONG so pardon my rambling in advance.

A lot of us here have tastes that are at the very least, a little more expensive than average, and so many times the financial side of fashion has a lot of weight. We've had a lot of discussion on this sub about quality/quantity in relation to price, things like cost per wear, etc. One thing I feel like we always forget is how liquid clothes can be - in other words, that especially today we can quickly turn them into cash, or even trade them for other pieces.

We're very lucky to live in a time in which sites like eBay and facebook have evolved into very convenient and lucrative marketplaces, and phenomena like Grailed are only contributing to this. You can buy an item, use it for a while, and then sell it back for most of your money. In some cases, you can even make money off of rarer pieces. This obviously includes resellers of Supreme and the like, but also for pieces that become increasingly rare over time.

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So why do I bring this up? Everyone knows that you can sell clothes for money, but there's a few reasons why I'm trying to remind people what this means.

Number one is that blowing a lot of money on clothes isn't necessarily a complete loss. Rather, it can actually be a decent investment - sneakerheads who have been at it for a while usually amass quite the collection, and the more notorious among them have collections that are valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the larger collections is valued at $750k, which is like owning a house.

Now I'm not saying you should invest in sneakers instead of buying a house, or that sneakers are some sort of magical investment that will grow over time. Hell, I'm not even saying that they're a good investment, I'm just using them to illustrate the point that you can look at your closet as full of assets.

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Reason number two that I'm bringing this up is to try and bring a different perspective to those of us who are more frugal, or lean more towards bargain hunting. Obviously, you can't turn around and sell clothes from Winner's or H&M anywhere nearly as successfully as designer clothes or hype pieces, so if you exclusively shop cheaper (by choice), you miss out on that aspect.

A little while ago we talked about CPW (cost per wear), which is pretty much the cost of something divided by the amount of times that you wear it. So for example, a $10 Tshirt you wear 10 times will have a CPW of $1.

Now, if you buy cheap tshirts, the cost will be less so you get more bang for your buck - the catch is, they definitely won't last as long, and you'll end up buying more tshirts to compensate. If you spend a little more and get a better quality shirt, it'll cost you more but you'll be able to wear it longer. This is the argument for buying more expensive, but better quality stuff in favor of bargains (buy less, spend more). In the long run, it can be better, or at the very least the same.

However, if you factor in that you can then turn around and sell that clothing, then the CPW formula completely changes. If you wear a $50 shirt 10 times, then turn around and sell it for the price you got it, then it was effectively free. In fact, based on the value of having worn it those 10 times, you can look at it like you 'made money'.

So reason number two is basically that you can get that much more value out of your clothes by selling them later on, and looking at them as assets. The thing is though, that things you buy at the mall on clearance won't retain much value at all, and you won't be able to sell them like you would a rare or designer piece.

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(personal example time) I'm a really big Cav Empt fan, and imo it's in kind of a middle ground in terms of hype and value. There's super dope, hyped pieces like the Icon Pullover (and most pieces from FW14) that are still very popular - the Icon in question retailed for $250 but now goes for over $1000 when it does pop up. However, most of the pieces don't have crazy resell markups. What I've noticed is that they retain their value, and as long as I don't mess up most of the pieces I have, I can sell them for around how much I got them for down the road. Therefore, I've found clothes I really like, that I can get a lot of value out of, and as it stands all the ones I own I can look at like assets. If I wanted to, I could turn around and sell them all today and maybe take a small hit in terms of overall dollar amount.

Therefore, I believe the key is to find clothes that can hold their value with good care over time. I'm slowly starting to opt for higher quality pieces, which like I've already said gives you better value, but also makes me think harder about my choices and in the end I have a lot of clothes that I like.

So that's just a long post saying that you can look at your clothes like investments, I guess. I hope I've offered a different kind of perspective to some, and I'd love to hear any discussion that y'all have in the comments.

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TL;DR: your clothes can be assets, and quality over quantity

edit: tried to make it a bit easier to read