Now, there’s no one single dominant aesthetic, and for men who are just starting to pay attention to clothes, the market has never been more bewildering. Many look back at those early 2000s days with a jaundiced eye, eager to say that nothing is genuinely timeless because, as history played out, many men moved on from those wardrobes. So, how can you possibly build a wardrobe that will last?

It’s still a good idea to know how to spot quality. “Buy less, buy better” was the mother’s milk of menswear writing in the mid-2000s, and the advice still holds. But it’s no longer enough to tell people to move down a checklist of essential items and dress like some Italian industrialist from the 1950s. Building a sustainable wardrobe nowadays means honing your antenna for something called “emotional durability”.

Emotional durability refers to the metaphysical side of garment production. Professor Jonathan Chapman introduced the term in his 2005 book, Emotionally Durable Design, where he stressed that “we are consumers of meaning, not matter”. Chapman built on the work of American social critic Mr Vance Packard, who distinguished functional obsolescence from psychological obsolescence. Functional obsolescence is when something becomes technologically outdated, such as old iPhones that no longer work with a cellular network, but psychological obsolescence is when something bears some immaterial defect. As Packard notes, a marketer’s job is to convince people to replace things that are still perfectly functioning.

The fashion industry runs on the idea of psychological obsolescence. Yesterday’s shade of blue is no longer en vogue, so you must update it. Slim fit is out of style, and now it’s time to replace everything with a new silhouette.

Building a wardrobe that you will love and wear for many years requires more than just being able to spot quality. It requires knowledge of self, confidence in one’s taste, and consideration of “emotional durability”. As much as you can, try to buy things that you think you’ll love wearing even in 10 years. Some suggestions on how to do that:

Fashion is ultimately about semiotics, so it helps to look beyond the physical markers of quality and consider the emotional reasons why you’re buying something. If you purchase things that are emotionally meaningful to you, you will increase your chances of holding onto them over time.

This could mean buying things from people who share your values. Or brands that connect to a certain part of your identity. It may also mean buying things with stories. Oxford cloth button-downs and Shetland sweaters provide a certain kind of comfort if you appreciate the history of Ivy style, which was a look formed by Jewish clothiers, worn by blue-blooded Wasps, spread westward by Black jazz musicians and preserved by menswear enthusiasts in Japan starting around the 1970s (a story captured by Mr W David Marx’s book Ametora). When something means something to you, you’re more likely to hold on to it.

Consider how the item will age. If you buy cheap sweaters made from low-quality yarns, they will quickly pill. Corrected-grain leather shoes will easily crack. Low-quality items often don’t age very well, which is why people discard clothes long before the end of their useful lifecycle. But if you purchase things that will age well over time – such as brown full-grain leather shoes that will eventually develop a patina that makes them look like the surface of a mahogany desk – you’re more likely to cherish them. Things that age well are more likely to be repaired, keeping them out of landfills.

There are a million guides nowadays encouraging you to shop more rationally – look for markers of quality and avoid the hype. But at a fundamental level, clothes have to make you excited. You can review all their dimensions in rational ways – fit, durability and value – but if a garment doesn’t make you feel cool and stylish when you put it on, it’ll have little meaning in your wardrobe. The emotional side of shopping is often discouraged because it’s associated with impulse shopping. But to borrow Ms Marie Kondo’s paradigm, you also don’t want to bring things into your home that don’t spark joy.

Give yourself time to build a wardrobe – at least five or seven years – and shop slowly. Pay attention to which things in your wardrobe continually make you excited. By treating this as a long-term project and paying attention to which clothes bring you joy, you will make smarter shopping decisions.

Ultimately, when things stay in our wardrobes, it’s about more than whether they’ve weathered trends or physically endured. It’s about whether they make us feel as good today as they did when we first put them on. The challenge is moving from the honeymoon phase with every new item to the longer, richer and more emotionally resonant period of cherishment. Let your experiences with previous purchases steer you.

The easiest way to build attachment to your clothes is to simply wear them, so you can interweave them with memories. You may cherish an old college sweatshirt because it reminds you of those years cramming for finals at the library. Or a jacket because of how it’s travelled with you around the world. The appeal of raw denim jeans, as stiff and uncomfortable as they can be at first, is that they will become psychologically comfy once they’re intimately familiar.

When people share a personal history with an item – everything from the specialness of how it was acquired to how it’s been worn and maintained – they’re less likely to throw it away.

A few years ago, Ms Rachel Tashjian Wise wrote an excellent article for GQ about how the most sustainable approach to fashion is having personal style. There’s nothing wrong with dabbling in trends, but are you confident enough to keep wearing things even when the trend has passed?

“Personal style, not fashion, holds the greatest reward: it allows you to invest in yourself, rather than in a bunch of ideas about who you could or should want to be,” Tashjian Wise wrote. “We’ve taught ourselves that our clothing can only bring a sense of joy the first time we wear it. But there are ways to train yourself to love something every time you put it on. The real test for me is: can I put it on, forget about it for most of the day, remember I’m wearing it at 4.00pm, and grin? If the thing is really great – and I promise you this – people don’t think, ‘I can’t believe he’s wearing that jacket again.’ They think about how cool it looks on you – and about how envious they are that you have a signature, that you dress like you really know yourself.”

Menswear has moved on from the heritage era of the early 2000s. There’s no longer a single narrative for how men should dress or guides on how clothes must fit. But this doesn’t mean that we have to abandon all the lessons from those years. We can approach the process of wardrobe building with an open mind, explore different aesthetics and pay attention to both the physical and emotional durability of clothes so that we buy things that will stay with us for many years.