How much longer must a $2,850 coat last to beat a $56 replica on cost per wear?

What it found

Combines the modelled replica costs and reported prices of garment-teardown with an assumed durability layer. With no resale and equal care the $2,850 trench must outlast a $56 replica by about 46× (52× for the $3,850 coat). With lognormal lifetimes (log-sd 0.5) and a 60-wear replica, the designer coat needs a median life near 3,100 wears to win half the time and wins about 6% of the time at 1,000; designer care of $1 per wear pushes the needed median to about 73,000. Lifetimes, care and resale are all assumed, not measured. Stylised.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

More in Engineered clothing

• Is a second garment better than a dearer single one?Is a second garment better than a dearer single one? A shell-and-layer pair beats the best single garment at the same budget in 54 of 66 wearing mixes at $50 and $100 (mean +0.49 C and +1.02 C) once thin cloth is removed; the apparent $20 gain is an artefact of thin cloth's negative assumed cost. Stylised; premiums and wearing shares assumed.
• How often can a wearer pick the wrong garment before a second garment stops paying?How often can a wearer pick the wrong garment before a second garment stops paying? With random wrong picks the pair's edge over one garment holds (+0.57 C at 30% error, $100); if every mistake is the worst option it falls from +0.55 to +0.09 C (stylised).
• How much conductive yarn does an RF-shielding fabric need, and how fast does breakage ruin it?RF-shielding weave model: 54–87 dB sheet shielding but the aperture bound caps it (36 dB at 2.4 GHz for 1 mm pitch, ~15 dB at 28 GHz); yarn breakage tracks 1/(1−2f) and conduction fails near 50% broken. Stylised; plane wave, ideal crossings, RF part only.
• Does contact resistance at yarn crossings matter for an RF-shielding fabric?Contact resistance at yarn crossings in the RF-shielding weave: no effect on an intact fabric, but with 20% of yarns broken a contact equal to one segment raises sheet resistance 22% and ten segments 2.3×. Stylised; contact values are a sweep, not measured.
• Does it matter where an RF-shielding fabric is damaged, and whether worn contacts go with the breaks?Correlated damage in the RF-shielding weave: worn contacts next to breaks (rc×10) raise the median sheet resistance at 20% broken from 2.05 to 3.03 segments; a fold band across the current direction at the same mean breakage leaves 57 of 60 draws open, while a fold along it helps. Stylised; wear multiplier is a sweep, not measured.
• How thin must a coating be to colour a fibre without dye, and how fragile is that colour?Thin-film transfer-matrix structural colour on a nylon-like substrate: 6-pair stacks reach 99% reflectance with 2–3 g/m² of oxide but blue-shift 48 ΔE by 60° incidence, and 10% layer-thickness error moves hue by ΔE≈10. Stylised; flat substrate, no dispersion.

All 45 Engineered clothing projects →

Other research topics

Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.