Words by Yasmin Tills

22 August 2025
The thread of thought

The Value Illusion (Delusion)

Or: Why What Costs More Rarely Gives You More — and What We Owe to the Word “Value”

There are few words in the modern consumer lexicon more abused than value.


We invoke it when describing a bargain. (“Great value for money.”) We weaponise it in luxury marketing. (“Our pieces are an investment.”) We deploy it in sustainability discourse, like a protective spell meant to ward off questions of overconsumption. (“We believe in timeless value, not trend.”)


But ask ten brands what the word means — and you’ll get eleven answers. Usually involving the phrase “premium” and very rarely involving, say, labour conditions or tensile strength.


This, of course, is no accident. It is not an oversight. It is the system.


Value has become the most flexible lie in fashion’s vocabulary.


It can mean cheap, expensive, recyclable, exclusive, or enduring. It is used to justify mass production as readily as it is used to frame a minimalist knit as luxury. Its power lies in its deliberate ambiguity — and the broader the term, the greater the markup.


The Price Tag Illusion

(aka: If it costs more, it must be better. Right?)



Let us begin with the most enduring fallacy in retail: the conflation of price with worth.


In fast fashion, "value" is equated with quantity and convenience. The £12 jumper. The three-for-two basics. The dopamine rush of checkout total math so low it feels fictional. Quantity becomes its own logic. If one t-shirt is £6, then ten must be ten times as good. Never mind the fibre content. Or the stitch count. Or the human cost. Harmful to both people and planet.


At the other end of the spectrum, luxury fashion performs the inverse trick: less for more. A t-shirt priced at £300, with no visible branding and no material difference from its high street cousin, is presented as an "investment piece." A near-empty bottle of “scented water” for £160.


Here, value is manufactured through scarcity, moodboard minimalism, and the performance of taste. Price becomes its own product.


In both cases, the consumer is being played. The trick is simple. One side flatters your thrift. The other flatters your taste. Neither guarantees a better product.


Both profit from your confusion.

How We Learn to See Value

(and why it's so easy to fake)


Humans are surprisingly bad at intuiting what something is really worth.


We conflate aesthetics with substance. We assume expensive means better. We believe a pristine boutique or a celebrity campaign implies quality — even if the clothes themselves were stitched by the same underpaid hands, in the same under-regulated factory, as their mid-market cousins.


This is how the illusion of quality is built.


Through content.


Through curation.


Through repetition.


There’s an entire economy built around this misperception. Not just fashion; tech, wellness, real estate.


A bottle of water with an Alpine label sells for five times more than municipal tap. A luxury cotton tee — identical in fibre and weave to its high street twin — is given a 500% markup because it was endorsed by the right person in the right colour palette.


In the digital age, fashion marketing, e-commerce and social media aesthetics are shaping our understanding of value more than material science ever has. In other words: value can be conjured.


The keyword-rich descriptions on product pages don’t mention lifecycle emissions or garment durability. They mention elegance. Exclusivity. Intentional design.


This is not value. This is theatre.

Who Gets to Define Value?

Here is the uncomfortable question: who gets to decide what is valuable in the fashion industry?


Not the garment workers. Not the regenerative farmers. Not the ecosystems. Not the wearers who find themselves replacing the same item again and again.


It’s an economy of perception. And the power to define value has, for decades, been concentrated in the hands of those who know precisely how to inflate it. Shareholders. Luxury consultants. Branding experts. Category buyers. Those who do not grow the fibre or stitch the seam, but who control the perception of both.


Meanwhile, the individuals who raise Merino sheep on regenerative farms, who harvest low-impact cotton, who oversee dyeing, spinning, cutting, and sewing — their contribution is excluded from the price tag.


The soil that feeds the fibre? Not accounted for.


The impact of plastic-based materials and fossil-fuel-derived synthetics? Externalised.


The garment’s actual lifespan? Intentionally shortened.


And still, it gets called “valuable.”


The irony is that real value has always been there — just not where we were taught to look. Not in the swing tag, but in the soil. Not in the logo, but in the fibre.


The question now is whether we’re ready to look again.

The Fallout of False Value

When we confuse cost with value, the damage accumulates slowly but comprehensively.


Planned obsolescence becomes the norm. Repair becomes obsolete. Natural materials are substituted for plastic blends that feel soft on day one and fall apart by day thirty.


Consumers, despite their good intentions, are pushed toward a cycle of endless replacement. The illusion of a smart purchase. But what they often get is a fast-degrading garment, an inflated sense of quality, and another addition to the landfill pile.


Worse, we’ve normalised this cycle. A garment is worn a few times, discarded, replaced, and the process repeats. Because we’ve been taught to believe a bargain is a win, even if it's a loss for the planet, and a zero for durability.


Meanwhile, the brands doing things differently — investing in fibres that regenerate land, in repair schemes, in full lifecycle accountability — get crowded out by those who’ve mastered the optics of virtue without the substance.

Value With a Spine


At Sheep Inc., we define value differently. Not as a story told after the fact. But as something built from the ground up.


It begins with sheep. With soil. With the carbon sequestered in the pasture. With the tensile strength of ZQ-certified Merino fibre. With regenerative low-impact cotton. Materials chosen not just for how they feel, but for how they hold up. For what they return to the land as much as what they give to the wearer.


And it continues with design. Our core staples — the everyday pieces we return to season after season — are built for long lives. Familiar shapes. Enduring fibres. Garments that ask to be re-worn, not replaced. That weather years, not months. That hold their shape, their colour, their relevance.


This is the difference between a marketing theatre and material commitment.


Integrity you can touch.


This is what pricing looks like when it carries the weight of what came before it. A reconciliation of cost across every phase: environmental, human, temporal.


It’s not perfect. But it’s honest.


And comes with the promise of wear beyond one season.


Because for value to mean something again, it has to account for everything it once ignored.

A New Definition of Value

Let’s reclaim the word.

Not to romanticise it. But to ground it. To give it dimension.

Value is not what costs more. It’s what endures.

It’s what can be repaired, not replaced.
It’s what respects its origins. And its end.
It’s what doesn’t apologise for its price, because it includes the price paid by others.
It’s not just what you feel at checkout. It’s what you still feel, years later, when the piece still holds.

That’s value. Not imagined. But earned.

Not a whisper. Not a shout. Just something that endures.

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