This is important. Price tells you very little about the quality of the clothing you are buying.

In an ironic twist, the best way to really assess what you are getting is to examine it closely in person, yet the fairly-priced, high-quality clothing mostly comes from direct to consumer brands that sell exclusively online or at best, in a handful of tiny boutiques in New York, London, and Paris.

No hard evidence like a peer reviewed study. But you can think about the things that cause clothes to wear out.

Fabric quality is one. The lint that comes out of the dryer used to be your shirt, for example. If you are buying a new shirt, better quality cotton fabric is made by spinning longer natural fibers into thread and knitting more threads per square inch. It’s tougher to yoink the long fibers out of the thread because they are spun in there over more twists, while cheaper, shorter staple cotton is more fuzzy and fragile. There’s also just more shirt left after each wash, because the thread count is higher to start with.

On the seams and hems, your high-quality shirt might have more stitches per inch, fewer stops and starts to the sewn thread, and more even stitching. Thanks to that, the sewing is not strained in spots by uneven tension. There are not dangling tufts of thread that can catch and be pulled out.

Finally, your better shirt will be cut better and will fit correctly (if you find the right one for your body, of course), which means it will not pull or rub or be subjected to as much strain.

Of course, you can mess all that up by laundering it on the most aggressive cycle every wash or eating a giant mustard sandwich without a bib, which is why it’s hard to get objective, controlled data.