Well, This Explains It... There’s Now Reason Behind Why You Hate All Your Clothes

If you've ever opened your wardrobe and sighed in despair, you're not alone

Wardrobe landscape
Wardrobe landscape
(Image credit: REX)

If you've ever opened your wardrobe and sighed in despair, you're not alone

Does this sound familiar?

It’s the first day of your new job and you’re determined to walk that line between on-trend and office appropriate. You were dead-set on your trusty Cos jumper and Whistles cigarette pants with those Dune pumps and your one nice LK Bennett handbag.

But when it comes to getting dressed, you can’t face that jumper you wore every other day in your last job and those trousers with the soy sauce stain that only you can see and those bloody heels that you always wear on the second date even though they pinch your third toe. The bag is still great, obvs.

If this or any variation of it has ever happened to you, turns out you’re not alone.

A new study has found that the more often you wear an item, the more you grow to dislike it.

No, we’re not talking about your favourite M&S nightie that you’ve had for about ten years and you still love. This phenomenon occurs when you have clothes that you bought for a particular occasion, like a date or a wedding, and you start to incorporate them into your everyday wardrobe.

If you had just kept that Reiss dress for weddings and dog christenings as you intended, chances are you’d still get a thrill from wearing it.

As well as seeing these once-loved items as tired and unwearable, by wearing them more you actually feel like you’re getting less use out of them.

"Across many different products and usage scenarios, we found the same result: when people perceived more variety among a product's usage situations, they liked the product less," reported study authors Jordan Etkin and Aner Sela.

This is of course the perfect justification for only wearing those Charlotte Olympia heels once and not feeling guilty about it. At all.

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