Conscious consumption: From fast fashion to slow fashion

A move to embrace slow fashion by buying less and choosing higher quality over lower prices – and moving away from fast fashion where the average garment is worn only a handful of times – can dramatically reduce consumption.

Zooming out from the personal perspective, the biggest challenge of the crisis has been to balance health risks and wealth risks. Focusing on the former while not losing sight of the latter required massive support and stimulus packages put together by politicians and policymakers all over the world.

Thanks to these packages, consumption in most countries has recovered very swiftly; in seven out of 10 of the world’s largest developed and developing countries, consumption levels are higher today than they were a year ago. While this shows the strength of worldwide consumer society, it does not mean consumption-as-usual any more.

Digging deeper into the data, there is a lot of evidence that consumption patterns and preferences are changing faster than ever before. The world’s consumers are becoming more and more conscious. This is not a new trend, but, as we have seen with trends in other areas of our lives, it has clearly accelerated during the coronavirus crisis.

The world of fashion tends to be fast and flashy. Our insatiable demand for the newest styles has led to the rise of fast fashion, a practice that sees producers churning out a high number of collections every year from cheaper materials and cheaper labour. This inevitably has significant adverse implications for quality, and tends to result in clothes that look faded, shapeless or shabby after a few washes.

The flipside of this high churn-out is excessive waste. Studies show that we only use 20 to 30 percent of the clothes in our wardrobes, each of which is worn a mere seven times on average before it is ignored or disposed.

Fast fashion comes with an ever increasing environmental footprint. A huge amount of water is needed for the manufacturing of the nearly 80 billion garments produced annually. Nearly 15,000 litres of water are required to produce one kilogram of cotton, which is roughly equivalent to the weight of a shirt and a pair of jeans.

A move to embrace slow fashion by buying less and choosing higher quality over lower prices can dramatically reduce consumption

In addition, garment production is also responsible for water pollution due to the amount of toxic chemicals being discharged into drains, rivers and lakes. Next to its environmental impact, the industry is often associated with poor working conditions – garment workers in developing countries hit the headlines because of very low wages and safety issues. That said, the rise of the garment industries has lifted many of them out of poverty.

In a world of fast fashion, we are spoiled for choice. Nevertheless, some form of change has been slowly gathering pace within the fashion industry, supported by growing consumer awareness of the industry’s negative impact on our animals, people and planet.

Labelled ‘slow fashion’, this movement seeks to encourage fewer purchases of garments and footwear, made of higher-quality, sustainable and locally sourced materials. Such an approach inevitably slows down the overall pace of shopping but enhances the consumers’ connection with fashion into one where ethics and sustainability matter as much as seasons and styles.

While the forced slowdown of the industry during the coronavirus crisis may have sped up the slow fashion trend, the transition of the industry is still in its infancy.

Carsten Menke, CFA, head of Next Generation Research at Swiss Wealth Manager, Julius Baer