The Spendrobe guides
How to read a designer piece.
Spendrobe is a daily game about guessing what fashion costs. To guess well, you need to know why things cost what they do. These guides are our notes on that: original writing, with every fact about a brand or material sourced at the foot of the page.
- How Spendrobe worksThe daily round, the five slots, and exactly how a score is worked out.
- What makes designer pieces expensiveHours, skill, fibre, construction and margin: what a high price does and doesn’t tell you.
- A guide to bagsLeather, stitching and the handful of designs that shaped the rest.
- A guide to shoesWelts, grain and why a resoleable shoe is a different object from a disposable one.
- A guide to outerwearGabardine, cashmere, vicuña, down and the question of the shoulder.
- Four style tribesQuiet luxury, dark luxury and the avant-garde, streetwear, and tailoring.
Who these are for
People who like clothes and want to look at them more closely, whether or not they ever buy the pieces in question. We name brands because you can’t discuss fashion without them, but nothing here is an advertisement: no brand has paid for or seen these pages, and no prices appear in them, because a price printed in a guide is out of date almost at once.
New to the game? Start with how Spendrobe works. Curious who’s behind it? Read the About page.