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In a hyper-consumerist era of social media, flooded with product reviews and shopping haul videos, a backlash to overconsumption is brewing.
More consumers are joining pledges such as the “Rule of 5” (where you limit fashion purchases to five items a year), conducting wardrobe inventories, or challenging themselves to buy nothing new in 2024 and shop their closets instead. “TikTok made me buy it” has become a common refrain for users influenced to make purchases from or on the app. Now, the hashtag #deinfluencing has been used more than 26,000 times, full of content creators working to undo some of that impulsive behaviour.
“What is good for the planet is also good for our mental health and our well-being. If we buy less, but we buy more mindfully, we are happier. And the planet is going to thank us because we don’t need that much stuff,” says Katia Dayan Vladimirova, senior lecturer at the University of Geneva and founder of the Sustainable Fashion Consumption research network. She and three colleagues launched a year-long experiment for 2024, the Joyful Closet Consumption Challenge, to help participants “rethink consumption patterns” and simultaneously study what challenges people face as part of that work, what motivates them to keep going, and what benefits they see if and when they succeed in reducing their wardrobe size and their acquisition of new clothes.
As public concerns around waste and climate change grow louder, the mood is shifting at the highest levels as well. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, calls for capitalism to evolve, or risk failing, grew louder. The head of the World Trade Organization, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, called on world leaders to “rethink old growth models”.
Where does that leave brands, whose sustainability efforts have largely focused on business practices but not transforming the business model itself? For a growing number of academics, economists, advocates, small brands and even sustainability professionals within larger brands, the writing is on the wall: brands need to adapt. Failing to do so could be a threat to their future profitability, which today depends directly on increasing product sales every year.
“We’re not going to achieve sustainability with fashion houses constantly needing to increase growth every year. No amount of circularity, no amount of anything is going to work,” says Joseph Merz, chairman of the Merz Institute and senior fellow at the Global Evergreening Alliance, who led a study last year concluding that human behaviour is at the root of the global environmental crisis.
Consumers taking steps to break shopping addictions could spur action. “We are, by nature, prone to addictive behaviour, and shopping can be an addictive behaviour. Because of our evolutionary history, we are also prone to needing to acquire and control or hoard resources,” says study co-author Phoebe Barnard, CEO of the Stable Planet Alliance and affiliate professor in environmental futures, ecosystem health and conservation science at the University of Washington. “That addictive impulse has been exploited for profit because of this economic system we have created.”
Making ‘less, but better’ stick
The key to designing for the future, experts say, is to align people’s needs with those of the planet — and to create business models that serve both, rather than work against them.
“There are completely different ways that we could be satisfying those needs. That’s what gets me excited, thinking about ‘what are the alternative ways?’” says Merz.
Vladimirova, among others, have already documented that through consuming less, people actually become happier and see boosts in their overall well-being. The Rule of 5 pledge, launched by fashion editor and sustainability advocate Tiffanie Darke in January 2023, has taken on a life of its own in just the last year. “I did it expressly to answer climate issues but was surprised that most of the response was from women sick of their own overconsumption, looking for a reason to stop,” says Darke.
Outside of shopping pledges, people can also take advantage of clothing swaps to gain a sense of community and new-to-you clothing options, and repair services, which are also on the rise. Overdyeing clothes can be an option, as can upcycling them into new styles — a practice shared by designers globally, from New York to Ghana’s Kantamanto market. The list is endless, it just requires some creativity, planning and a little intention setting.
What a more balanced business model could look like for brands, the researchers behind the Joyful Closet challenge suggest, is that fashion’s profits can be “repartitioned” such that new product sales account for only a fraction of a company’s revenue, as opposed to the majority of it. In her “Post Growth Fashion” Substack post, Vladimirova envisions a future where customers continue to spend money on fashion, but only 40 per cent of their total expenditure (instead of today’s 97.9 per cent) goes towards acquiring new pieces; 30 per cent would go to “fashion experiences” such as rental or digital fashion, and the final 30 per cent would be spent on “maintenance and improvement”, like repairs and upcycling.
Also important is how these changes are framed, talked about and modelled. “It’s about the modelling of the behaviour, not what we tell people to do,” says Merz. “We don’t look at the drivers of our behaviours — they’re all around us pushing us in the complete opposite direction of what we’re telling them to do. We’re shining a spotlight on one area and telling people to do this, while we’ve got all of these behavioural influences pushing people in the other direction. I think it’s critical to recognise that.”
Moving away from overconsumption, in other words, needs to become the “cool” thing to do, or it needs social proofing, in the words of Rachel Arthur, a sustainability strategist who authored the United Nations’ Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook. “We need to bring on board more influencers, thought leaders, creators who can help make sustainable lifestyles truly aspirational, as well as inspirational,” she says. “We need the really big names to come forth here and that’s not happened yet.” Will the current de-influencing and anti-overconsumption trend become permanent interests or fade away as the year wears on?
Merz is optimistic, despite how entrenched certain interests are in maintaining the status quo. “We would have a much larger challenge on our hands globally if the current system were breeding really satisfied, happy people. It isn’t, it’s breeding unwell people.”
And this is where fashion has the potential to lead or risk being left behind. “There’s a creative reimagination that needs to happen. What are the alternative revenue streams brands [can turn to] instead of — not in addition to, as what’s been happening now, but instead of — selling new stuff,” says Vladimirova. “It’s harder to imagine a positive post-growth future than to imagine a dystopian post-apocalyptic future. It’s a crisis of imagination.”
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