We know fast fashion is destroying the planet. We're buying more of it anyway. Here's why.
We know fast fashion is destroying the planet. We're buying more of it anyway. Here's why.
Published by Samantha, founder of Teddy Locks
In 2000, the world produced 58 million tonnes of textile fibre. By 2024 that had more than doubled to 132 million tonnes. The global fast fashion market is currently worth around $163 billion and is projected to reach $388 billion by 2034.
This is not happening because people are unaware of the problem.
A peer-reviewed study published in January 2026 surveyed 557 consumers about fashion and sustainability. It found that quality and price consistently outweighed sustainability in purchase decisions — and that sustainability ranked lowest as a purchasing factor even among consumers who described themselves as environmentally aware. Despite awareness of environmental impacts, frequent shopping persisted. The researchers called this the knowledge-attitude-behaviour gap. Knowing what something costs the planet does not, by itself, change what you buy.
Who is actually buying.
The fastest growing segment of fashion retail is not the conscious consumer. It is the 16-to-35-year-old shopping on a phone in 10 minutes, driven by an algorithm that already knows what she wants.
Shein — founded in China in 2008, now the world's third largest apparel brand by market share — generated $38 billion in sales in 2024. Its average price per item is $14. It adds between 2,000 and 10,000 new styles to its app every single day. In the UK, 26% of consumers shopped at Shein or Temu in the past 12 months. Among Gen Z specifically, that figure is 30%. The Shein app was downloaded 235 million times worldwide in 2024 alone.
The business model is straightforward: produce tiny quantities of each style to test demand, manufacture only what sells, ship direct from Chinese factories to consumers globally. They are not stuck with surplus stock, which is common among fashion brands. Instead, the environmental cost is pushed entirely downstream — into the dyeing processes, into the microplastics shed during washing, and ultimately into the textiles that end up in Kantamanto or the Atacama Desert.
Temu, launched in 2022, went further. Its prices are typically 10-40% below Shein's. It operates as a marketplace connecting Western consumers directly to Chinese manufacturers with excess capacity. The result is clothing so cheap that in some categories it competes on price with secondhand clothing.
Neither of these companies could have existed without smartphones, social media, and the logistics infrastructure built by Amazon and AliExpress. They are technological phenomena as much as fashion ones.
Why awareness is not enough.
The knowledge-attitude-behaviour gap is well documented in consumer psychology. It appears across categories — food, travel, energy — but it is particularly pronounced in fashion. Several things explain it.
Price makes the responsible choice feel unreasonable. A pair of Shein leggings costs £6. A pair made with certified recycled materials and transparent supply chains costs £40-60. For a 22-year-old on a graduate salary, that is not a difficult choice — it is an impossible one. Sustainable fashion has, for most of its existence, been a luxury market that presents itself as a values market. The marketing says "choose better." The price says "only if you can afford to."
The dopamine loop of novelty is engineered, not accidental. Shein's demand modelling identifies emerging micro-trends and produces garments within 10 days. The algorithm that surfaces those garments is designed to create desire, not satisfaction. The pleasure is in the scroll and the purchase, not in the wearing. Research consistently shows that the average number of times a garment is worn before disposal has decreased by 36% over the past 15 years. The clothes are not the point. The buying is.
Moral licensing makes things worse. A study published in Nature's Scientific Reports in October 2025 found something disturbing: between 2020 and 2024, 37% of respondents increased their clothing donations — while simultaneously increasing new clothing purchases by 38%. The act of donating created permission to buy more. Shopping secondhand showed the same pattern: secondhand consumption was positively correlated with new clothing purchases, not substituted for it. The sustainable behaviour became a reason to be less sustainable overall.
Social media has collapsed the distinction between seeing and wanting. TikTok's average user spends 95 minutes per day on the platform. A significant proportion of that time involves watching content — hauls, try-ons, outfit ideas — that is functionally advertising, whether the creator is being paid or not. The psychology of social comparison means that what others are wearing creates desire in the viewer. Fast fashion platforms have weaponised this with affiliate codes, creator partnerships, and gamified reward systems that make shopping feel like participation in a community rather than a transaction.
Who is most affected.
The growth of fast fashion is not evenly distributed, and the framing of it as a consumer choice problem obscures something important about power.
The consumers most targeted by ultra-fast fashion platforms are young women with limited disposable income. The workers producing the garments are overwhelmingly women in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia and India, earning minimal wages that make the $6 price point possible. The communities absorbing the textile waste — in Ghana, Chile, Pakistan — are in the Global South. The marketing of fast fashion is directed at women. The cost of fast fashion is paid by women.
This is not an argument for not caring about your own purchasing choices. It is an argument for understanding that individual consumer guilt is a very convenient frame for an industry that prefers to locate the problem in the buyer rather than the producer.
Why the market keeps growing despite all of this.
The honest answer is that the market keeps growing because the incentive structures support it.
Fashion brands have no financial obligation to manage the end-of-life of their products. The cost of the cotton crop in India, the chemical effluent from the dye house in Bangladesh, the textile waste in the wetlands of Accra — none of these appear on any brand's balance sheet. They are externalised costs, absorbed by the environment and by communities with less political power to resist them.
When costs are externalised, the market price signals the wrong thing. A $6 polyester top signals that a garment is cheap. It does not signal the water consumed in its production, the CO₂ emitted in its manufacture and shipping, or the probability that it will spend centuries fragmenting into microplastics in a landfill. Those costs are real. They are simply not reflected in the price.
The emerging policy response — Extended Producer Responsibility schemes, the EU Ecodesign Regulation, mandatory recycled content requirements — is an attempt to change the incentive structure by forcing some of those externalised costs back onto the companies creating them. The UK has not yet implemented EPR for textiles, though the Textile Recycling Association continues to call for it.
What the secondhand market is and isn't doing.
Secondhand fashion has grown significantly — global sales reached $177 billion in 2022 and are projected to double by 2027. Vinted, Depop, ThredUp and their equivalents have made resale mainstream, particularly among younger consumers. This is genuinely positive in terms of extending garment life and reducing demand for new production.
The complication, as the Nature study showed, is substitution. If buying secondhand gives you the experience of acquisition without the guilt, and that experience then increases rather than decreases total clothing consumption, the net environmental effect is neutral or negative.
The secondhand market is most valuable when it genuinely displaces new purchases. It is least valuable when it becomes another dimension of the same consumption habit it was supposed to replace.
What actually changes behaviour.
The research is somewhat pessimistic on this but not entirely. A few things show consistent effects.
Making the environmental cost visible and specific at point of sale has a measurable impact — not large, but real. Labelling that shows a garment's carbon footprint, water use, or expected lifespan changes some purchase decisions, particularly among consumers who describe themselves as values-motivated.
Price parity matters more than everything else. When sustainable options cost the same as fast fashion alternatives, adoption is significantly higher. This is why policy interventions that price externalised costs into fast fashion goods — through carbon pricing, import tariffs that reflect environmental standards, or EPR levies — matter more than any amount of awareness campaigning.
And the data on durability is unambiguous: consumers who buy fewer, better-made items consistently report higher satisfaction with their wardrobes and lower total spending over time. The cost-per-wear argument, made honestly and specifically, changes how people evaluate purchases. A £40 sock that lasts five years costs 2p per wear. A £6 sock worn ten times and discarded costs 60p per wear. This is not a complicated calculation. It is simply not the calculation the market is set up to encourage.
Teddy Locks socks are designed to last — not as a marketing position but as a deliberate engineering choice, because durability is the most honest sustainability claim available to a small brand. If you'd like to understand exactly what goes into them and why, the materials and certifications are explained in detail across our blog posts and website.
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