What Do You Value?

How do you determine the “value” of something?

Not, like, a painting or a diamond or anything like that with a somewhat “objective” value, I mean: how do you determine what you’re personally willing to pay for something? How do you decide when a price is justified…and when it’s not?

With the price of literally everything going up, a lot of very unfortunate truths about the world we live in—particularly as Westerners—have been brought to the surface. Namely the fact that almost every single aspect of our standard of living—from the necessities to the frivolous—are made possible through exploitation, and that the things we consider reliably “affordable” should probably never have been so cheap to begin with.

I’m not here to talk about eggs, though.

I started thinking about the way we think about value during one of the many, many conversations about mocktails—that is, non-alcoholic cocktails—that seem to spawn on social media every other week. If you spend any amount of time on Threads or Twitter, you’ve no doubt seen a post go viral proclaiming that a mocktail shouldn’t cost anywhere near what a cocktail costs—that they, ideally, should be priced around $3-5 at most, because, obviously, they lack the ostensibly expensive part of a cocktail: the liquor (to be clear, I’m talking about real cocktails/mocktails with real recipes and multiple ingredients—not just your vodka sodas and the like).

What do cocktails/mocktails have to do with clothes? Nothing, really, but when it comes to the perceived value of each, I find the general school of thought approaches them in comparable and similarly flawed ways. Yes, I’m going to explain, gimme a second!

Let’s start with the notion that liquor is the most expensive part of a cocktail. At wholesale prices, you’re looking at less than a dollar worth of liquor per drink. Similarly, the fabric for, say, a simple, A-line dress is pretty cheap: your average quality cotton bought wholesale can be less than $2 per yard and your most basic dress only needs about 2, maybe 3.

But what else goes into that cocktail? Typically there’s liqueurs and garnishes—things that can’t always be bought wholesale, sometimes that are made in-house. Comparably, there can be details and materials that go into that dress that make it a little more complex, especially custom fabrics or closures like buttons and zippers: things that have to be crafted specifically for that piece. When we start talking about the technique that goes into making a good cocktail, as well—like, separating out egg whites (I love a frothy drink), lighting things on fire, even just zesting or peeling citrus—we can liken that to those extra little construction elements like French seams or curved darts for better fit or, really, anything beyond a simple stitch. And even before that cocktail made it onto the menu, or that dress made it onto the rack, someone—often someone with years of training and practice and knowledge and experience—had to conceptualize it and create it and perfect it.