The Average American Spends Less Than 3% of Her Disposable Income on Clothes
Today I have stumbled upon this piece of news.
According to Dr. Mark J. Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, Americans spent a whopping $326 billion on clothing and footwear last year. But that was only 2.98% of their overall disposable income. In 1950, on the other hand, Americans spent 11% of their discretionary income on dressing up. However, this does not mean we are buying less clothes (God forbid!). We are certainly buying more, since not only the price of clothing has decreased by 8.5% since 1929 (even when you adjust the numbers for inflation), but the rise of the Fast Fashion phenomenon also made it cheaper to buy apparel. If you want to feed your stylish inner geek, just click on Dr. Perry’s link, he has lots of info and even graphs on this subject.
So, long gone are the days where people would actually save money to invest on a timeless piece that would last forever on a chic wardrobe. Today, instead, we are stuffing our ever growing closets with more cheaper stuff.
It reminded me of this great book Fashion Victim: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Dressing, Shopping, and the Cost of Style
by journalist Michelle Lee. She dubs it McFashion. Wanna Super Size your closet?
What do you think?
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