Choose Slow: A Sustainable Ambition

THE PROBLEM

We created our project to highlight the issues of the fast fashion industry. Taplin (1999) defined fast fashion as the unplanned process on the reduced time gap between designing and consumption on a seasonal basis. Fast fashion operates on a much shorter timeline than slow fashion (Abernathy et al., 1999), with mass-market retailers offering low prices that have led to a culture of disposable fashion (Lee, 2003).

The issue with fast fashion is that as trends change so rapidly, the period of clothing use is becoming shorter and clothes are being discarded more frequently. This poses a myriad of issues, namely the social injustices faced by factory workers, often in developing countries, who produce these garments at extremely low cost to satisfy urgent consumer demand. Crewe (2008) explains that “there are a great many fashion victims, all connected by the invisible threads binding this global system of garment design, production, retail, consumption and wear”. Further, the consumerism and throwaway culture associated with fast fashion is reported to be one of the leading causes of global warming (Zamani, Sandin, & Peters, 2017). Textile production is one of the most polluting industries, producing 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, which is more emissions than international flights and maritime shipping. This is not taking into consideration the waste that comes with the disposable nature of fashion fashion. Over 235 million clothing items are sent to landfill each year, which results in the production of as many greenhouse gases as all the planes flying around the world (Devaney, 2017). Despite these damaging effects, there is still only limited discussion around the issues of fast fashion and the associated benefits of slow fashion. We want to change this.



OUR INTERVENTION

A solution to this overconsumption and waste, which we are working to promote, is slow fashion. Slow fashion is an awareness and approach to fashion which takes into consideration the processes and resources that are needed to make clothing, highlighting the need to place value at every step in the journey.

Our chosen media was a campaign film demonstrating ways to incorporate slow fashion pieces into one’s wardrobe and everyday wear. The film begins with fast fashion advertisements, and then transitions into models wearing slow fashion pieces - to highlight that individuals can look just as good in slow fashion as models advertising fast fashion. The slow fashion items shown come from charity shops, swapping or borrowing clothes from others and hand-me-down items from family. A key idea that we wanted to convey is that abiding by slow fashion principles does not mean you have to throw out all of the fast fashion items that you own. It is about raising awareness of the issue and therefore inspiring the audience to start making more ethically conscious purchasing decisions. This is emphasised in our final slogan: ‘chose slow, a sustainable ambition’. This simple message is equally evocative and motivating in order to encourage the audience to think about how they interact with the fast fashion industry and the impacts this has on the environment, as well as the supply-chain.

With these ideas in mind, we thought the best platform to gain exposure would be a university event which the audience was already planning on attending, without knowledge of our campaign. Therefore, to reach our target audience we partnered with Warwick LINE Fashion and Art Society to premiere our campaign at their 5th annual Fashion Show alongside one of their runways which also sought to promote slow fashion. Through this partnership we were able to reach over 200 attendees. More so, we applied to have the video played on the television screen on the piazza of Warwick’s central campus to reach a wider audience.



BEHAVIOUR CHANGE TECHNIQUES USED

Our chosen target audience was university students, aged 18-25, who make up a considerable portion of the fast fashion market (Workman & Studak, 2006). With young adults being a key consumer perpetuating the fast fashion industry, as well as being easily accessible at Warwick, we thought focussing on this age range would be the most effective in terms of being able to change behaviours. According to the Yale Attitude Change approach, people between the ages of 18-25 are more susceptible to attitude change. After these ages, attitudes of people tend be become more stable and resistant to change.

We could have chosen to bombard the audience with statistics about the harmful effects of the fast fashion industry in terms of pollution, social injustice and waste. However as we know, the deficit model of science communication rarely enacts any kind of persistent change. Hence, we alternatively tried to employ more subtle nudges to persuade our audience. We chose to generally employ ‘Social Learning Theory’ in our campaign by featuring fellow university students in our film. Making the ease of slow fashion more salient by presenting peers in the video, rather than unattainable supermodels, we hoped to motivate the audience to mimic similar others.

Depicting these choices as ‘desirable’ is particularly important in terms of persuasion since research has shown that “we complete ourselves symbolically by acquiring things that compensate for our perceived shortcomings” (Denniss & Hamilton, 2005). This notion of ‘self-completion’ associated with fashion decisions makes it extremely hard to successfully influence behaviour. This led us to also include part of the MINDSPACE framework during planning and production of our video. Presented by Dolan et al. (2010), this framework has been developed to aid policy makers by collecting nine of the most robust effects that can lead to behaviour change through System 1 Processing.

Message: According to Dolan et al. (2010), evidence says that messages from those who are similar and liked can generate compliant behaviour. Hence, within the campaign we used university students in order for other students to relate to them. When promoting slow fashion, we attempted to relate to everyone we spoke to so that they were more receptive to our message.

Incentives: During the campaign, we have included labels and tips on how you can implement slow fashion into your life, for example swapping clothes with friends or making them yourself. Choosing slow fashion is beneficial for university students as it is cost effective, environmentally friendly and does not encourage the harsh working conditions that many of the fast fashion companies have in factories. We were also aware of hyperbolic discounting. We wanted to show how choosing slow fashion can be easily implemented today and does not require a huge lifestyle change.

Norms: We hope to implement a change from fast fashion being the norm to change people's perceptions of slow fashion, encouraging them to shop vintage. Since we take cues from other people’s behaviours, by observing other students borrowing each others clothes, customising clothes and wearing vintage, we hope to revise the social norm of fast fashion. Additionally we hope this will create a positive feedback loop to spread the message further.

Salience: Our behaviour is greatly influenced by what our attention is drawn to. Our chosen campaign method was to make a film. The short 1 minute persuasive advertisement is ideal for university students whose lives are dominated by receiving information through technology. Due to the speed and brief, but powerful message in this campaign, we hope gain the attention of our audience, who have previously been exposed to the rampant messages from fast fashion brands. In these information-rich environments, the increasing competition for attention makes it more complex for individuals to make informed decisions, leading to suboptimal outcomes, another issue we have to tackle (Hills, 2018).

Priming: Throughout our campaign we hope that we initiated conversation about where student purchase their clothes from. We hope that next time they’re about to make a purchasing decision, they will think about alternative options due to our priming influence.



FUTURE DIRECTIONS

In order to reach a wider audience and expand the campaign, we have been in discussion with Warwick Students Union Sustainability Officer, David Chapman, to negotiate running a university wide campaign. The plan includes getting in contact with societies to run ‘Slow Fashion’ events throughout campus in the hopes of reaching more of our audience. As previously mentioned, this will increase the effect of positive feedback loop to spread our message to wider audiences.




References:

Abernathy, F. H., Dunlop, J. T., Hammond, J. H., & Weil, D. (1999). A stitch in time: Lean retailing and the transformation of manufacturing--lessons from the apparel and textile industries. Oxford University Press.

Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1977). Social learning theory(Vol. 1). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-hall.

Crewe, L. (2008). Ugly beautiful? Counting the cost of the global fashion industry. Geography London., 93, 25. 

Denniss, R., & Hamilton, C. (2005). Affluenza: When too much is never enough.

Dolan, P., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., King, D., Metcalfe, R., & Vlaev, I. (2012). Influencing behaviour: The mindspace way. Journal of Economic Psychology, 33(1), 264-277.

Hovland, C. I., Janis, I. L., & Kelley, H. H. (1953). Communication and persuasion.

Hills, T. T. (2018). The Dark Side of Information Proliferation. Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Lee, M. (2003). Fashion victim: Our love-hate relationship with dressing, shopping, and the cost of style. Broadway.

Taplin, I. M. (1999). Statistical Review: Continuity and change in the US apparel industry: A statistical profile. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal, 3(4), 360-368.

Workman, J. E., & Studak, C. M. (2006). Fashion consumers and fashion problem recognition style. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 30(1), 75-84.

Zamani, B., Sandin, G., & Peters, G. M. (2017). Life cycle assessment of clothing libraries: can collaborative consumption reduce the environmental impact of fast fashion?. Journal of cleaner production, 162, 1368-1375.