Why Are Clothes So Expensive Now? The Answer Changes at the UK Border
Google's autocomplete finishes that sentence in eight different countries, which made me wonder whether the two governments that price clothing every month agree with it. I pulled ten years of July readings out of the US and UK indexes, counted which months the basket costs most, and found one thing the American number did this summer that it had only done once before, by a rounding error.
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Type “why are clothes so” into Google and it will finish the sentence for you about twenty ways, across eight countries. Expensive in the UK. Expensive in Canada. Expensive in Japan, in Europe, on Amazon, on QVC. Expensive now. Expensive now, reddit.
It’s that last pair that gives the game away, because “now” is a claim about time, and claims about time can be checked against something.
So I checked. Not against a brand, and not against the supply-chain explainers currently ranking for the question, which on the day I looked included a fabric mill, two garment manufacturers and a Forbes finance-council post. I checked against the two agencies that have to publish a number every month whether it flatters the industry or not: the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the UK Office for National Statistics. I took the July reading for every year from 2017 through 2026, which gives ten July-to-July windows, and put clothing next to everything else.
We haven’t bought any of this. What follows is arithmetic on two public series.
Why are clothes so expensive right now?
US apparel prices rose 3.9% in the year to July 2026, the biggest July-to-July jump since 2022, and for the first time in the last decade clothing clearly outran inflation as a whole, which came in at 3.4%.
That sounds small. It is the whole story anyway, because of what the previous nine windows look like.
| Year to July | US apparel | All items | Clothing minus everything |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | -0.5% | +1.8% | -2.4 |
| 2021 | +4.2% | +5.4% | -1.2 |
| 2022 | +5.1% | +8.5% | -3.4 |
| 2023 | +3.18% | +3.18% | +0.005 |
| 2024 | +0.2% | +2.9% | -2.7 |
| 2025 | -0.2% | +2.7% | -2.9 |
| 2026 | +3.9% | +3.4% | +0.50 |
Nine of those ten years, clothing lost to the rest of the shopping basket, usually by two or three points. The 2023 row is a tie I’ve printed to three decimals so you can see how thin it is: apparel 3.182%, everything 3.178%, a gap of five thousandths of a percentage point. That’s a rounding error wearing a trophy. The 2026 row is a hundred times wider.
Have clothes actually got more expensive since 2019?
Barely, and this is where the index and your bank statement stop agreeing. Women’s apparel in the US is 4.2% higher than it was in July 2019. Everything else the BLS prices is 30.1% higher.
Run that as money. A hundred dollars of women’s clothing in July 2019 tracks to $104.21 by the index this July.
A hundred dollars of everything else tracks to $130.15. Seven years of rent, groceries and insurance doing what they did, while the sweater sat still.
Which is a genuinely strange thing to publish under a headline about expensive clothes, so here’s the caveat in full. The index prices a basket, not your basket. It adjusts for quality, it re-weights as shopping habits move, and it has no opinion whatsoever about the specific coat you’re looking at, whose maker may well have raised its own sticker by 40% while the national number crawled. What the index can tell you is the direction of the whole market, and the direction for seven years was down, in real terms, relative to everything else you buy.
Are clothes getting more expensive in the UK too?
Not this year. UK clothing and footwear rose 0.5% in the twelve months to July 2026, while UK prices overall rose 2.8%, so British clothing kept doing the losing thing that American clothing just stopped doing.
Over the longer stretch it flips, which I didn’t expect. Since July 2019 the UK clothing and footwear index is up 18.8% against 32.4% for all UK items. The American clothing figure over the same seven years is 9.8%. So British shoppers have had the worse decade and the better summer, and anyone shopping both sites for the same brand is living inside that gap.
The obvious suspect for the American half is the border. Dr. Sheng Lu, a professor in the University of Delaware’s Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies, tracks what US importers actually pay, and his March figure is that the average tariff rate on US apparel imports “reached 35.1% in December 2025, hitting a new high in decades and a sharp rise from 14.7% in January 2025.” Elsewhere on the same page he puts the December-to-December move at 14.7% to 31.5%, so treat the exact landing point as a range rather than a decimal. Either version is a doubling at minimum. His earlier work has apparel at 2.5% of US imports by value but 15.6% of all tariff duties collected, and $11.9 billion paid in apparel duties in 2024 alone.
Here’s the part that explains the flat years. Over the same twelve months that the tariff rate roughly doubled, Lu notes, the average US clothing retail price rose 0.3%. The industry ate it. Vince chief executive Brendan Hoffman told Glossy in January that the brand had put average product prices up around 6% and “we were thrilled that people held steady with price increases,” and McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2026 has 71% of surveyed fashion executives planning increases. The 2026 row in that table is what the end of the absorbing looks like.
What is the cheapest month to buy clothes?
December, and it isn’t close. Across the eight complete years from 2018 through 2025, the US women’s apparel index in December averaged 95.7 against its own annual average of 100, with July at 96.8 and January at 97.2 behind it.
The expensive end of that list is the awkward bit, given the date. March averages 103.5. October averages 102.8. September averages 102.5. September and October are the second and third priciest months of the American clothing year, and they are also the exact fortnight in which every fall list, this site included, starts telling you what to buy.
| Month | Women’s apparel index, 8-year average |
|---|---|
| December | 95.7 |
| July | 96.8 |
| January | 97.2 |
| September | 102.5 |
| October | 102.8 |
| March | 103.5 |
September against December is a gap of 7.1%. On a $200 coat, that’s $14.29, which is not life-changing and is also not nothing, and it is entirely a function of when you open the tab.
Same caveat as before, said plainly: this is a basket, not a coat. The December basket is heavy with marked-down winter stock and the September basket is heavy with new-season goods at full sticker, so the index is partly just measuring the markdown calendar rather than any change in what a garment is worth. That distinction matters less than it sounds, though, because the markdown calendar is the thing you’re actually shopping. It’s the same reason waiting on the fall rack keeps working, and the same reason the Labor Day weekend rarely earns its billing.
So the honest answer to the search term, in two parts. Yes, American clothing got more expensive this year in a way it hasn’t in a decade, and no, it hasn’t yet undone seven years of getting cheaper against everything else. British readers can skip the first half entirely.
And if you’re standing in front of a full-price fall rail this week, the index isn’t telling you the industry got greedy. It’s telling you that you’re shopping in month ten of twelve.