Noelle McCarthy: Quality over quantity

A three jumper wardrobe is not everyone's cup of tea. Picture / Thinkstock.

How long do you expect your clothes to last for? Not a consideration that's ever really guided my shopping in the past, to be honest. I buy clothes I fall in love with; clothes I have an overwhelming desire to possess immediately.

Then I met a man who epitomises frugality. It's not that he's tight, he just doesn't believe in spending money unwisely. He explained this the first time we went to the supermarket together, while he was calculating which cans of plum tomatoes represented better value.

He's appalled at the thought of replacing any item of clothing before it has done solid service. He has a three-piece suit that's been going for almost 25 years and counting. It's built to last, and nicely cut; you'd never know that Blur were in the charts with Country House when he bought it. He held it up for me to see recently.

All I could think about was what he was missing. Craftsmanship and durability notwithstanding, the thought of having only one suit for 25 years depresses me immensely. What about variety? What about freshness? There are so many gorgeous clothes out there, who can be content with only one of anything?

A suit is a bad example of this, possibly. A suit, of all garments, is something you can make do with only one of. Especially if you're a man, and you wear it only for weddings and funerals. So long as your body shape doesn't change radically, you can reasonably expect to get at least a decade out of it, and if you do lose or gain a lot of weight, well, what are tailors there for?

It isn't just suits that the boyfriend's durability requirements apply to, however. He had three jumpers when I met him, not one of which he'd owned for less than half a decade. Nor did he intend to buy more until one of them disintegrated.

Stitching up a hole in one of them endeared me to him hugely, even though the seam I made looked like one of Frankenstein's monster's sutures. He didn't care; it was the principle of the thing that mattered more than the look of it.

I own way too many clothes for his taste. He doesn't understand why anyone needs more than say, four dresses. I don't know whether this is a common divergence of opinion between men and women, or if we're the only two who differ on this issue.

I suspect the former, looking at the fashion industry. The increasing popularity of collections in-between seasons, the "resorts", the "pre-falls" and "pre-summer" ranges, mostly by womenswear labels suggest a craving for variety in the female market not paralleled by the male counterpart. That's not to discount all the fashion conscious peacocks out there who buy a new suit every season.

In any case, I don't feel guilty about having a bigger wardrobe than he does. I stopped buying fast-turnaround high-street stuff around the time I started reading about the miserable lives of factory workers in developing countries. I support local designers who make their clothes here and keep the New Zealand garment workers going. After all, it's not just the longevity of the clothes that matters, but the longevity of the industry.

- VIVA