Look who's noticed...

The industry picks up on our campaign, and it's quite a moment

It’s today’s must-read in the Business of Fashion, which means we are getting noticed. Hooray! Thank you to everybody in this community for talking, sharing and demonstrating your commitment to engaging with fashion in a way that does not involve buying 500 things a minute. With today’s report in the BoF, this means we are now under the noses of the people that count: the sales directors, chief marketing officers and CEOs of the world’s most influential fashion brands.

Rule of 5: How It Works. For those new to this community, here is a brief description about what it is and how you can get involved

You can read the whole BoF article here (PAYWALL) so I really hope BoF don’t mind if I share a few excerpts here. By the way, the reporter Sarah Kent also spoke to Remake Our World, who are running a similar campaign about not buying anything for 90 days. If you have fallen off the wagon, or are still wondering whether you really can curb your shopping habits, it might be a place to start. You can find out more about their campaign here.

This is how BoF have reported the story:

Last December, Tiffanie Darke took an inventory of all the clothes she’d brought over the course of 2022.

Though the former editor-in-chief of London’s Sunday Times Style magazine and brand strategist thought she had been abstemious — an effort to protect both the planet and her wallet — she had in fact bought some 20 new items, including one pair of loafers, three pairs of trainers, three shirts, three jumpers and “a really luxury pair of tracksuit bottoms.”

“I’m feeling a bit shame-faced,” Darke confessed in a video posted to Instagram on New Year’s Eve, before committing to a New Year’s fashion resolution to only buy five new things in 2023 and inviting others to join in.

The idea came from a report published by the Berlin-based think tank Hot or Cool Institute in November, which laid the blame for fashion’s hefty environmental footprint on overconsumption by wealthy shoppers in rich countries. To keep the industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions in check, in line with global efforts to stave off catastrophic levels of climate change, affluent consumers in places like the US, UK and France should be limited to an average of five new items a year, the report found.

“It was such a shock and it was so tangible … I’m not a fashion denier at all — it’s glorious. But it turns out it’s also really bad for the world,” said Darke. “[But] five things isn’t denying yourself fashion. Five things is enough.”

The BoF article goes on to describe “the rise of the reductionists”:

Darke counts among a small but growing niche of people looking to disconnect from the churn of the fashion system.

Financial Times fashion editor Lauren Indvik has also pledged to only buy five new things this year. Fashion advocacy group Remake has launched a campaign to encourage its 155,000 Instagram followers to commit to buy no new clothes for the summer. And on TikTok, some “deinfluencers” are using their platform to urge followers to buy less.

The movement dovetails with a broader shift in the cultural narrative towards less conspicuous consumption, underpinned by growing anxiety about the climate and cost-of-living crises.

“There’s a cohort of consumers now — because it’s definitely not everybody — that feels stuff as an emotional load,” said Allyson Rees, a senior strategist at trend forecasting firm WGSN. For this group, financial pressures and growing awareness of fashion’s environmental and ethical shortfalls have turned once pleasurable impulse buys into a weight. “[There’s] guilt associated with those products now that I don’t think consumers were attuned to, even like three or five years ago,” said Rees.

Then they share my shame about failing miserably on purchase number two, but hey, we’re all human. “The Shopping Compulsion” they call it:

When Darke first started her year of five new things, there was something sort of thrilling in the challenge. Then, last month on a work trip to Ibiza, where she co-runs a fashion store focused on responsible brands, she cracked. On an impulse, Darke bought a pair of gold silk cargo pants.

“They’re not practical: I won’t wear them every day,” said Darke. “Sometimes you need something really inappropriate to bring you joy.”

The temptation to shop — even for those highly engaged with the issues created by overconsumption and committed to change their habits — points to the reasons why we keep buying more and more clothes, even as the number of people who say they care about fashion’s environmental impact grows.

“We want to shop,” said Carolyn Mair, a fashion business consultant and author of “The Psychology of Fashion.” “Buying something new gives us a sense of high. We get dopamine from the hunt. We feel we look good in what we’re wearing. So regardless of the cost or consequences of making that purchase, it makes us feel good.”

Humans are hardwired to crave newness and the sense of social status and security that has long been linked to dress.

For its part, the fashion industry has honed its marketing tactics to capitalise on these deep-rooted emotions and turned shopping into a form of entertainment, turbocharged by the rise of social media and ultra-cheap, ultra-fast e-commerce.

“The availability is just constant; you don’t need to have a trip to the high street, it’s in your hand 24/7,” said Mair. “That is tempting for us. When we see it, we want it. If we don’t see it, we want it less.”

Politicians have noticed this too, and want lawmakers to take action. Shein is now under attack from French political party Place Publique, who this week kicked off a campaign "lambasting Chinese [fast fashion] e-tailer Shein for wielding overconsumption, particularly of fossil-fuel-based materials such as polyester, as a 'weapon of mass climate destruction'."

Its Stop Shein petition asks for advertising to be regulated against strategies that encourage overconsumption, by "delisting or blocking any website of a brand that puts on the market a number of new references greater than or equal to 1000 per day."

It must have felt a bit like this for the tobacco companies before regulation came in. Or the automobile industry when they had to fit seatbelts. Things that once felt so counter intuitive that very quickly became the social norm.

Does it suddenly feel like over consumption in the fashion industry might be next? I’d love to hear your thoughts.