Good reasons to buy expensive clothes

Today, my very first Turnbull and Asser shirt arrived in the mail. A brand new shirt identical to the one I received retails for roughly $220. (135 pounds, if you want to be precise) This is certainly a lot of money. When you consider that I can walk into a target and buy a dress shirt for thirteen dollars and tax, I admit paying more than $200 for a shirt sounds excessive. But it's not always expensive.

There's a few different kinds of expensive. There's "good expensive". Things that cost a fair amount of money and are worth every penny. There's "Not-so-good expensive". Things where you pay a premium for some attribute like exclusivity or style, but where there isn't an equivalent in quality. A lot of expensive shirts fall into this category. They might be better than $20 dollar shirts, but they're not hundreds of dollars in quality better.

Then there's "hidden expensive". You *can* buy a used luxury car for a fraction of what it costs new, but you'll soon discover that the repair bills add up quickly. Heck, I drive a Volkswagen and I've put almost all of what I paid for it, into repairs. And my car doesn't have 12 cylinders or complicated computers to go wrong.

Similarly, you can buy a bunch of cheap things that will last you a little time. You could keep buying 5 dollar umbrellas and use them until they break. Or you could buy one quality umbrella and have it last a lifetime. Probably even longer than a lifetime. And sure, if each umbrella lasts two years, you might come ahead price-wise. But factor in all those little costs about environmental damage. One quality umbrella is going to be a whole lot greener than ten cheap ones.

Blah blah greener, right? Here's a little story to bring up the next point. I used to help out the USC ultimate frisbee team. We would sell frisbees to alumni at football games. I was really good at it. The trick? I asked them to hold the frisbee in their hands. We sold official, 175 gram frisbees. As soon as whomever I was selling the disks to held the frisbee, they could feel the difference. They knew they were getting a quality disk.

Trying this shirt on for the first time, it felt... good. It wasn't just a piece of cotton to put on my body. The sleeves fit my arms. I wasn't drowning in a sea of extra fabric around the hips and waist. Shouldn't the things you use make you feel like a person worthy of having little luxuries? You have to do so many mundane things, shouldn't you try and make them special?

The big confession is that I didn't actually spend $200 for the shirt. I was lucky enough to come across an ebay auction, and I scooped it up for under $50. This is the other side of the coin: Just because a quality shirt costs a lot of money doesn't mean that you have to pay full price

As the philosopher Smokey Robinson once said: my momma told me you better shop around.