Is There Ever a Reason to Own a $100 T Shirt?

You have $100 to spend on anything you want. What do you buy? Perhaps you take yourself out for some pricey cocktails, splurge on a new wallet or maybe you just go get a nice bottle of champagne for the next big thing in your life. Or maybe you go out and get a new white tee shirt. Yes, you read that correctly; a new white tee shirt for $100. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Well, that depends on how you look at things in life. It might sound ridiculous upfront, but it’s not always a bad idea to splurge a little bit on something like a basic. And guess what? A basic white tee is a basic. It can be worn all year; with shorts, with a skirt, with jeans, with a blazer, dressed up with heels and a jacket, with a skirt and a suit or just over your swimsuit on the boat for the day.

There is nothing the plain white tee cannot do for you in life, which is why you have to have one of your own. But should you spend $100 on it? Well, let’s do the math. If you spend $25 on a white tee shirt when you need one, you save a lot of money. You could buy four of them for $100 and always have a clean one you can wear.

Or you can spend $100 on one tee shirt and have one you can wear for a long time. You see, the difference is not in the price. The difference is in the quality. A really well-made designer tee shirt is going to last wash after wash. It’s not going to fade or thin out or look gross after a while. It’s going to last. This means you might get a few months out of your cheap white tee, or you might get a few years out of your expensive one. So let’s do some math.

You spend $100 on a tee shirt and it looks amazing for about 3 years. You spend $25 on a tee shirt and it lasts about 4 months after washing and wearing it repeatedly. That means you’ll need 3 a year for the same three years. That’s $225 on tee shirts when you go the cheap route, or $100 on one tee shirt. You do the math and tell us if there is ever a reason to own a tee shirt that costs you $100.

Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Jordache