Today

British shoppers will spend about £580m in the January sales on clothes they will never wear, a poll has discovered.

The survey, by Churchill Home Insurance, reveals that 23 million adults will visit the sales this January, each spending an average of £25 on unwanted garments.

Men are worse than women and fritter away an estimated £40 on more than two items of clothing.

Collectively, this means that men will spend £350m in the sales on tops, trousers and coats that will remain on the hangers they came on.

In contrast, women will waste only £230m in the sales on clothes that will never be worn.

The research also shows that the average woman already has nine items in their wardrobe they haven’t worn in the last year.

Men are almost as bad with eight garments clogging up their drawers and cupboards, according to the survey.

There are a number of reasons for the unworn clothes trend - the main one given for not wearing sales buys is simply having nothing at home that matches them.

Men are more likely than women to buy something that will go out of fashion quickly (11 per cent), is the wrong colour (6 per cent) or is just too big (6 per cent).

One in ten men admits to buying items that are high-fashion as opposed to suiting them.

Meanwhile, women are more likely to buy a garment that is too small (12 per cent) or that they bought smaller in the hope of dieting into them but failed (4 per cent).

Nearly a fifth of women have bought high-fashion garments that they know look better on the hanger than they do in person.

Psychotherapist Christine Webber said: "The January sales tend to cause a rush of blood to the head. And when that happens we seem to be immune to our normal patterns of rational thinking.

"There is something in all of us that loves to beat the system. And when we manage to buy - for example - a piece of designer clothing at a knockdown price, we feel that we've done just that. It's a kind of guilty triumph.

"Unfortunately, sometimes when we get the purchase home and look at it in the cold light of our own bedroom mirror the love affair with our bargain is all too frequently over."