Hi everyone!! Happy that you are dropping by the Fast Fashion Run(a)way 🙂

Fast fashion – Cheap! Trendy! Fast delivery! Almost too good to be true, these allures have indeed made it hard to turn away from the industry. To put this into context, I compared a black crop blazer from two brands – SHEIN, an ultra-fast fashion brand and Lovet, a local brand.

 

If you are looking to buy a blazer and assuming there is no considerable difference in quality, which one would you be more inclined to purchase? If you are a broke university student (like me…), you would probably consider SHEIN, where the blazer goes for less than half the price of Lovet’s.

Now, what if I told you: SHEIN has poor transparency on their business practices, and are reportedly employing children in unsafe work environments? Which one would you buy now?

What you may face now is a conundrum between ethical consumption and the consumption of fast fashion. Can you come to a decision easily? This conundrum draws me back to the paradox I spoke about in my first post – If fast fashion is so bad, why is it still here and why do we still love it so much? This paradox was one of the reasons why I decided to write about fast fashion here, and in this post, let’s explore more about this paradox through McNeill and Moore’s (2015) study.

 

McNeill and Moore’s (2015) study

Their paper discusses the conflict between a consumer’s awareness of sustainability and ethical production and their purchasing behaviour. To do so, the authors explore consumers’ attitudes towards the consumption of sustainable fashion and from there, also “identify the impact of the ‘fast fashion’ psyche on [the consumer’s] attitudes” (McNeill and Moore 2015: 212).

In the first part of the paper, the authors provide a background on the current landscape. They lament how the insatiable appetite for new clothes fuels the multi-billion dollar industry. Consequently, the lucrativeness of the industry has safeguarded it against boycotting and obsolescence. To some extent, this legitimises unethical and unsustainable practices in fast fashion. Some consumers are incognizant of these practices but even among the more enlightened consumers, there are disparities between values and behaviours, or what may be referred to as the value-action gap. For example, this occurs when a consumer’s desire to be ‘fashionable’ outweighs his/her desire to be sustainable or ethical.

 

Theoretical grounding of the paradox

Many models and theories were formulated to understand the value-action gap like Ajzen and Fishbein’s (1980) Theory of Reasoned Action and later, Ajzen’s (1991) Theory of Planned Behaviour seen below.

 

In Ajzen’s (1991) theory, an individual’s motivation (or intention) is a predictor of whether they perform a given behaviour. Another element in this theory is perceived behavioural control. For instance, a person who is more confident in speaking a foreign language may be more likely to succeed in doing so than someone who lacks the same confidence (Ajzen, 1991). However, while these may provide some theoretical grounding to understand the value-action gap, these theories were not created with fashion consumption in mind and its applicability to our context may be limited. The drivers for the consumption of fast fashion and its sustainable and ethical alternatives are far more complex than say, a single activity like picking up a foreign language.

 

As such, in their exploratory research, McNeill and Moore (2015) offer another perspective from the fashion industry, contributing to the fashion and consumption literature. In the next post, we will explore some of their findings…but until then, let’s keep running away from fast fashion!!!

 

Cheers,

Chermaine

 

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References

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T

Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1980). Understanding attitudes and predicting social behavior Prentice-Hall.

Lovet. (2022). ON FLEEK SLEEVED BUTTON BLAZER #MADEBYLOVET (BLACK). Lovet. https://lovet.sg/product/on-fleek-sleeved-button-blazer-madebylovet-black

McNeill, L., & Moore, R. (2015). Sustainable fashion consumption and the fast fashion conundrum: Fashionable consumers and attitudes to sustainability in clothing choice. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 39(3), 212–222. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijcs.12169

SHEIN. (2022). SHEIN Button Front Flap Detail Crop Blazer. https://sg.shein.com/SHEIN-Button-Front-Flap-Detail-Crop-Blazer-p-3402283-cat-1739.html