Britons are fashion hoarders, women keep unworn buys, men won't bin anything

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Feb 8, 2018

Women in the UK are spending money on clothing and shoes that they don’t wear with shoes the biggest problem, new research shows. A survey by budget home goods retailer Wilko showed that 46% of women have bought shoes that remain unworn, 37% have clothes that still have the price tags on and 25% have deliberately hidden a purchase from their partner, to avoid an argument.

And it seems that 8% of men have decided it's a problem and have secretly thrown away something they found in their other half’s wardrobe.

Some 68% of the women polled admitted to being hoarders and said that clothes they buy on shopping sprees often lie unworn in drawers and wardrobes. That’s perhaps no surprise given that more than half of them said they own at least 100 items of clothing and 10% have over 250. And while the average pair of shoes women own is 18, as many as 80% said they only actually wear three or four pairs regularly.

Among both men and women, consumers aged 55 and over are more likely to wear the same few clothes frequently (54%) while the 18-24 age group is less likely to do so (36%), preferring to buy more items from fast fashion retailers.

But men overall are less likely to buy clothes and shoes they won’t ever wear, although the fact that they’re less likely to buy fashion items in general is key here. Only 24% have more than 100 items of clothing and men own no more than nine pairs of shoes on average.

One bad habit they have though is that they hang on to clothes when they’re long past their prime. Around a third of men own T-shirts that are over a decade old and 15% have past-their-best jeans that they simply can’t bear to throw away. Worse still, 10% of them have socks and underpants that they bought in 2008 or earlier.

Part of that is laziness as they’re less prepared than women to sort through what they own and throw away or recycle what they don’t need any more.

Only 22% of men sort through their wardrobes and drawers every six months, compared to 37% of women. Some 13% of men never have a good clear-out, compared to only 6% of women.

The survey was conducted among 2,000 adults as part of Wilko’s support for Keep Britain Tidy’s Great British Spring Clean initiative this month.