The cost of a sweater, divided by the years you will wear it

There is a calculation, popular among the thrift-conscious, called cost-per-wear. You take what a thing cost and divide it by the number of times you have worn it. A £300 coat worn two hundred times has cost you £1.50 a wearing. A £30 dress worn twice has cost you £15. The maths is meant to console.

But the calculation, looked at carefully, is not really about money. It is about attention. To know the cost-per-wear of a garment is to know two things at once: what you paid, and what you have actually done with it. The first is a number you knew on the day. The second is a number that accumulates quietly, against your own forgetfulness.

It is, in other words, a moral instrument. The expensive thing you wear constantly grows cheaper every Tuesday. The cheap thing you wear once grows more expensive every season it hangs unworn. The number is a small, honest reckoning of whether you chose well.

In Atelier, every item carries its cost-per-wear, updated each time you log a wear. The leaderboards are not a ranking; they are a mirror. The cheapest item in the wardrobe is, almost always, not the cheap one.