The Value in Feeling Clothes #

September 23, 2025
Nowhere in particular

Quite often when I am talking to people about fashion and clothes, they bring up the very high price point of luxury clothes as a common criticism. Often, they perceive the price of these garments to be far too high in relation to the product that you are getting. I have changed my opinion a lot about pricing when it comes to clothes. At first, I tended to believe that higher prices generally resulted in higher quality clothes that would last longer. That is not necessarily true any more (maybe it was never true) and, regardless, the relation to which the price increase of a garment relates to the quality increase in the real world might not seem to be the most reasonable to the general viewer.

For me, a lot of the clothes I am interested in buying have had some form of a trade-off in clothing design, quality, and price. For the most basic of clothes, things like oxford cloth button downs, wool sweaters, and raw denim, the prices can vary a lot, but at some point, the noticeable differences become more minor. For more avant-garde clothes, the barrier to entry is going to be a bit higher, because certain designs will be inherently harder to produce than others.

A more avant-garde look from ROSEN. This outfit involves a button down shirt with a tied sash above the waist, cropped pants, and a linen poncho-like jacket that drapes slightly windswept behind the wearer. This was probably difficult to produce. Pulled from The Rosenrot.

Going back to the more “basic” clothes, you can buy a lot of these garments incredibly cheaply at an H&M or Zara or something similar, but they will be noticeably worse than clothes even slightly higher on the quality scale. If I take the example of an oxford cloth button down (OCBD), the first one I had ever bought was probably from Express. It would’ve felt like plastic and looked super glossy and shiny in a weird way. A number of years ago, I had gotten a new one from Uniqlo, when they had first expanded into my area. The quality jump was noticeable, both in the way the garment felt, and also in the way it appeared. The fabric was 100% cotton, it had a softy grey color that didn’t glare in light, and it fit my body pretty well. There were still some noticeable setbacks, like how the collar was still pretty small (so it didn’t have a good collar roll), the buttons were sewn very tightly onto the shirt (so the fabric warped in a circle around it when buttoned), and the shirt didn’t have much character or develop much character over time (it was as flat as a plank of cardboard). Much more recently, I got a shirt from Kamakura, at yet another higher price point, but the jump was noticeable, yet again. Besides the same quality improvements present in the Uniqlo shirt, this shirt’s fabric was thick and stiff, and it softened after wearing it and washing it over and over again, giving it lots of character. It also has an incredible collar roll and makes me feel great whenever I wear it. After having tried other OCBDs, this has become my current favorite, and is one of the garments that I keep going back to when I’m not sure what else to do.

The OCBD from Kamakura — A white OCBD shirt. The wearer has a dusty yellow chore coat draped over his shoulders and has his white shirt tucked into a pair of dark blue trousers. His shirt sleeves are cuffed and the shirt itself looks somewhat rumpled and relaxed on the wearer. Pulled from Kamakura Shirts.

While each jump in clothing quality gave me a noticeably different change in feel, the outward appearance probably changed less drastically. At the end of the day, they were all OCBDs. Now, if I were to go for an even higher-end OCBD, like say one from Drake’s, there will certainly be some minor visual changes, but I imagine that most of the value of that shirt will translate into how it feels on the person wearing it. At this point in the quality/price dichotomy, most of the changes will be something experienced by me the wearer, rather than the viewers.

Recently, I was watching a video by Brandon Acker, where he was talking about a series of different guitars at different makes. At one point, the co-host, Marshall Brune, notes that “the first $5000 are for the audience, all the rest is for the artist”, highlighting how the sound the guitar produced didn’t change much after spending about $5000 on a guitar, the remaining you spend is on enhancements that only you will notice. This immediately felt familiar to my experience with clothes. For the first maybe $100-$200, the external differences of those OCBDs were probably noticeable, but after a certain point, much of the differences will be felt by you. You will notice minor fabric differences, you will notice the comfort of your clothes, and you will notice the fit of your clothes. All of these are things that you will notice more and more with very high quality clothes.

A cashmere poncho from Brunello Cucinelli FW25. It costs $5,800. The outfit involves a charcoal grey denim shirt with generous squared chest pockets tucked into wide and deeply pleated grey wool pants that are kept up with a long black braided leather belt that drapes outwards. Over top is a soft grey blanket-like poncho with fringes that makes the wearer's otherwise sharp outfit look softer. Pulled from Brunello Cucinelli.

People like to make jokes about the high cost of t-shirts and other garments from brands like Brunello Cucinelli. I don’t know if that price is worth both the value of the garment and the idea of what you are buying into, but I know that the person wearing that t-shirt probably feels something different than when they are wearing a t-shirt from Uniqlo, even if externally we don’t notice many differences. Sometimes, some of the value we have in a garment is in the personal feel of wearing it.

This probably varies more than I am presenting here. There is, for sure, not a strict correlation between the personal feeling of wearing a garment and the price of that garment, or even the quality of that garment, this is just something I had noticed with clothes that I was purchasing and wearing. This is partly why you should always try on clothes before you buy it, the totality of a garment is much more than just the way it looks.