Purdue retail behavior experts: Rethinking the fast fashion system through behavioral science

Hongju Cho, left, and Jiarui Li, PhD students in the Purdue University White Lodging-J.W. Marriott, Jr. School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, study retail behavior, which has been key in the rise of fast fashion. (Tim Brouk)

Written by: Tim Brouk, tbrouk@purdue.edu

An influencer is wearing a stylish, never-before-seen top. You must have it. Soon, you see online ads with a top close to what the online star was wearing — and it’s affordable. You order, and you’re wearing it in a week or two.

But then the top is out of style in months, and you pitch it in the trash in favor of a newer, even more fashion-forward garment. You are now stylish for the time being and a cog in the world of fast fashion.

Fast fashion refers to rapidly produced, trend-driven clothing designed and discarded at a rapid pace. This behavior has put a strain on the global environment. Recent reports alerted that 85% of all textiles wind up in dumps each year and washing certain clothes — usually cheaper items with nylon and polyester — releases “500,000 tons of microfibers into the ocean each year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.”

Jiyun Kang

Jiyun Kang, associate professor in the Division of Consumer Science within the Purdue University White Lodging-J.W. Marriott, Jr. School of Hospitality and Tourism Management (HTM), and her PhD students have been monitoring fashion systems for years. One focus of Kang’s research program is understanding human-centered fashion retail and luxury systems and consumer behaviors.

“We don’t just see fast fashion as affordable clothes. We look at it as highly optimized yet structurally unsustainable decision-making systems,” Kang explained. “Fast fashion is designed to remove the resistance from consumption by lowering emotional attachment, psychological ownership or perceived purchase risks. As a result, the psychological lifespan of a garment is significantly shortened.”

Sustainability within the industry is a pressing concern, according to Kang, and it ultimately intertwines with consumer behavior shaping the retail landscape. As long as the current linear consumption systems persist, the industry will continue to face challenges of post-consumer textile waste and its impact on water and land ecosystems.

Fast fashion effects

Some of the prominent companies in the fast fashion sphere include H&M, Shein, Forever 21, Zara, Uniqlo and Temu. These are massive multinational conglomerates that produce high volumes of affordable clothing. But after the fit is deemed out of trend, that discarded top joins millions of other such garments in the landfill.

The sheer amount of discarded clothing is piling up, contributing to global environmental issues. Some of the environmental impacts fast fashion has on the planet include:

• The World Resources Institute found almost 5,800 pounds of clothing is either dumped or burned every second of the day, which could fill the Empire State Building in 24 hours.
• The fashion industry uses a massive amount of water. Seven hundred gallons of water are required to produce a cotton shirt, and about 2,000 gallons are required to make a pair of jeans. It is estimated that fast fashion guzzles more than 2 trillion gallons of water a year, according to Nature.
• Dyeing clothing is one of the biggest water polluters on the planet, according to Business Insider. Water leftover from the dyeing process is often dumped into rivers, oceans or the ground, which pollutes ground and drinking water.

While accelerated consumption cycles exist across many contemporary retail practices, the mechanisms of luxury, which are characterized by craftsmanship, longevity, quality and psychological ownership, can offer inspiration for slowing down this cycle. These mechanisms foster a stronger brand relationship between the customer and the company, and a deeper emotional attachment to the garment itself. Integrating elements of this psychological ownership into broader retail models could be a key opportunity to reduce the industry’s environmental footprint, Kang said. 

“Consumers generally do not buy luxury items one day and then discard them the next day. It involves a fundamentally different behavior system. So that’s why we are right now researching how the mechanisms behind luxury consumption can lead the way for the broader fashion industry,” Kang said.

Jiarui Li, one of Kang’s PhD students, added, “Compared to fast fashion brands, luxury products have heritage characteristics. They can last several generations (of fashion trends). For example, a well-crafted handbag can be used for decades. So, that’s the unique characteristic of luxury compared to fast fashion.”

What can be done?

There are numerous sustainability practices to lessen clothing pollution — donating to local charities; recycling; downcycling (turning old shirts into household rags, for example); and upcycling, such as transforming a pile of no longer worn T-shirts into a quilt.

A newer option can reduce your closet contents while growing your wallet. HTM PhD student Hongju Cho cited how companies like Depop, Poshmark and Vinted allow users to sell their clothing online. Peer-to-peer platforms like Pickle, By Rotation and Tulerie let consumers rent used clothing with the option to buy.

Artificial intelligence can help promote sustainable choices. Cho said such technology can remind the user what they already purchased, determine if the style is right for the consumer and if the company that produced the garment is environmentally friendly.

“Future AI systems have the potential to help consumers slow down and think more carefully and better understand the sustainability impact of what they buy,” Cho explained. “It could make consumers more aware of the tradeoffs behind the lower price of the fast fashion product. So, in that way, AI could become like an assistant for more responsible consumptions for the consumers.”

However, the most crucial catalyst for change against fashion pollution is shifting consumers’ underlying behaviors and the systems that drive them.

“Mindfulness alone does not always change the behavior system,” Kang explained. “In our research, we found that consumers often face psychological paradox. For example, a consumer might think, ‘I bought secondhand clothing from a vintage store today, which can justify buying more new fashion items tomorrow.’ This moral licensing shows that the systems likely condition customers to value transaction more than meaningful and responsible consumption experiences.”

Li has noticed around Purdue that students seem to truly care about the environmental effects of fast fashion and other issues. However, she notices them still buying into fast fashion, thus reinforcing her research that change must start with consumers’ behavior.

“I think there is a significant gap between the intention and behavior because fashion trends are so fast. It’s changing so quickly,” Li explained. “Social media and the internet create constant pressure to keep up. I think the attraction from social media makes younger consumers consume the fast fashion more easily, but they are still knowledgeable about it (the global issues). Their behavior is not always aligned with what they know.”