What ASKET’s year-long wash-and-wear experiment tells us about clothing longevity
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Longevity underpins a lot of sustainability discussions in fashion. Poor quality is pointed to as being a major contributor to the negative impact of fast fashion. Critics talk about the short lifespan of clothes that fall apart after a few wears and washes, and are then discarded.
In response, some brands have focused on the quality and longevity of their products as a point of difference.
What’s often missing though is evidence to back up a lot of these claims.
How well do the clothes really hold up once they’re in the hands of consumers? Can brands genuinely claim that their products last longer than others – that they’re worth paying more for?
ASKET has spent the last year finding out.
Caption - Image credit: ASKET
A one-year wear-and-wash experiment
Founded in 2015, Swedish clothing company ASKET is a well-known name in sustainable fashion. It only creates and sells a single permanent collection of a limited number of essential clothing items, which are all made in Europe from natural fibres.
With its products designed to be timeless – and therefore stay in customer wardrobes for as long as possible – ASKET wanted to study just how long-lasting its garments are.
This is a difficult task given that most consumers own a lot of different clothing, which means different items get worn at different levels of frequency over time. Items that are worn and washed more often are expected to wear out faster than others.
To get a true sense of what happens to clothes when they’re worn and washed – and how long it takes the condition to degrade to the point that a consumer might throw an item out – ASKET ran a year-long, wear-and-wash experiment.
Starting on March 8th 2024 and running until March 8th 2025, 50 men based in Stockholm took part in the test. Four of the participants were ASKET employees; the rest were customers.
As far as possible, each participant was asked to wear a wardrobe made up of just eight ASKET products for the whole year. This was to make sure that the garments were worn as much as possible, essentially simulating the number of wears they might be expected to get over the course of multiple years in a typical customer’s wardrobe.
The eight chosen garments were 2 t-shirts, 1 Oxford shirt, 1 merino sweater, 1 cashmere sweater, 1 sweatshirt, 1 pair of jeans, and 1 pair of chinos.
Participants were required to wear at least one of the eight garments on a minimum of 85% of the days the experiment ran for.
So, what were the results?
Caption - Image credit: ASKET
What does the data say?
Reporting was key to the value of the experiment – ASKET needed to be able to track wears and washes for each item per participant. So, the brand built its own basic tracking app.
To ensure that participants didn’t drop off in their data reporting, the app sent a text message to each participant each evening, asking them to log their data for the day. This included which item(s) they’d worn that day, if the garment(s) had been washed, and a condition rating for the garment(s).
By asking for a condition rating each time – ranging from 1 (trash) to 5 (mint) – ASKET hoped to be able to monitor how each item degraded over time from wear and washing.
At this point, ASKET hasn’t released the full data from the experiment, but we do have stats from the first 300 days – which is over 82% of the test period. Essentially, we can get a pretty good idea of how the products held up.
Firstly, the participants wore at least one of the garments on 87% of days. This is above the 85% required to take part.
On average, participants wore two of the eight items every day.
After 300 days, each garment was worn on average 62 times and washed 12 times.
And after all that, the average condition rating for each garment was 4/5. That’s not far off the mint rating (5).
Things get more interesting when you dig down into some of the individual participant reporting. For example, one contributor reported wearing the jeans 298 times – essentially every day of the experience – and still rated them 4 out of 5 for condition after all that wear.
A t-shirt worn 135 times by another participant was also rated 4 out of 5 for condition after 300 days.
Crucially, the only items that were rated 1 (unwearable) after 300 days were the ones where the consumer had some sort of accident, like staining or tearing the garment.
Caption - Image credit: ASKET
Longevity is really hard to measure
The biggest thing that ASKET’s experiment reveals though is that longevity is hard to measure – because so much of it is down to customer action.
Take the ASKET customer who wore their t-shirt 135 times in 300 days. They also report washing that t-shirt 29 times. A different person may have washed the same t-shirt more – or less – times after the same amount of wear, which could have affected the condition rating.
The number of times a customer puts a garment on is one thing. Another is what they do while wearing it – what level of friction and stress are their clothes under? Are they doing light, everyday activities or are they working in manual labour? Are they playing sports or sitting at a desk? Are they walking 2,000 steps or 10,000 steps a day in a pair of shoes?
Washing is another factor. Some customers will wash an item after every wear and some won’t. Some items like jeans are designed to go a lot longer between washes than others. Some customers will perfectly follow the washing instructions and some won’t, affecting longevity.
And as ASKET themselves note, some items are used more frequently than others. A t-shirt and jeans are likely to get more wear year round than a knit. Garments that layer under others may need washing more often than a top layer or be subject to more friction.
Essentially, it is really hard to put a figure on how durable a product is. But by conducting this experiment, ASKET now has better data than most brands on how its products hold up under real-life conditions of customers’ wear and care – of customers living with them. And it can share that with shoppers to help guide their decision-making.
Caption - Image credit: ASKET
Durability is essential to a sustainable fashion future
At the same time, we can’t ignore the reality that the vast majority of consumers don’t hold onto all their clothing purchases long enough for them to wear out. Therefore claims of durability and reduced cost per wear may not be the most effective way to make them buy, because they won’t have the item long enough to see those benefits.
But this doesn’t mean that brands should abandon the quest for quality and longevity.
As Sweden’s Mistra Future Fashion reported, ‘extending the lifetime of each garment so it can be used for twice as long would reduce the environmental burden by almost half’.
A sustainable fashion future isn’t just about clothing that an individual customer can own until it wears out – even if buying less and wearing it more is the most environmentally friendly option. It’s also about garments that are durable enough to be resold and re-worn multiple times by different people, so that consumers have a viable alternative to always buying new.