Fashion and Sustainability: What do consumers really care about?

Introduction

According to The Business Research Company, the global apparel market size is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.8% from 2020 and reach $842.7 billion in 2025, and $1138.8 billion in 2030.

With this massive industry growth, concerns have arisen around the negative impact of fast fashion and mass consumption. If we consider the waste created from neglected apparel, the resulting carbon emissions from factories, the exploitation of cheap labor to reduce margins, and much more, this trend is not entirely great. While some believe that we should all be doing our part in reducing our impact on the environment, others argue that factors like higher price points, lack of accessibility, and limited options make it difficult to support more “ethical” clothing brands.

In the rest of this article, we’ll take a look at the rise of the conversation around fashion sustainability throughout the years, some major differences between fast fashion and sustainable fashion, as well as general public sentiment on these two terms.

We will focus on three brands: Shein, Zara, and Reformation. The first two fall under fast fashion and the third falls under sustainable fashion. For the purposes of scope, we will only look at Women’s Apparel. These brands were chosen because they 1. are three of the most popular and well-known brands today, 2. offer products in Women’s Apparel (tops, bottoms, dresses), and 3. represent a range of prices and options.

Data and Methods

• Used gtrendsR to analyze Google Trends and the popularity of search terms like “sustainable fashion” and “fast fashion” within the past five years. Also looked at the frequency of searches of brands “shein” and “zara”.
• Used rvest to scrape pricing data from Reformation.
• Used Chrome extension WebScraper to gather pricing data from Shein and Zara.
• Used RedditExtractoR to harvest user comment data from subreddits like r/sustainablefashion to analyze user sentiments around phrases like “fast fashion” and “sustainable fashion”.

Findings and Visualizations

Growing Consumer Awareness

The conversation around ethical consumption has evolved. To set the scene, we will look at how public awareness about topics like fast fashion and sustainable fashion has changed during the past few years.

Google Trends can be a helpful tool to get a quick view of what behaviors, language, and general things are trending in a market at any given time. Y-axis “hits” are scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics.

While both graphs show a generally increasing trend, peaking in mid-2020, “fast fashion” has much more hits in proportion to all searches compared to “sustainable fashion”. Overall this can be viewed as a positive sign that individuals are growing increasingly aware of both and the distinction. The peak is consistent with a boom in online shopping during the months of May 2020-June 2020, at the same time the conversation around ethical consumption became even more relevant and top-of-mind.

Note: Search data on Reformation is not included; the search “reformation” can have many meanings and there was no way to extract search results solely related to the clothing brand.

Again, we can see that historical searches for “shein” follow an upward trend, peaking drastically in mid-2020. We can infer that with the boom in online shopping, Shein gained popularity during this time. On the other hand, searches for “zara” have remained fairly cyclical, peaking around the same time each year. We can infer that Zara’s popularity has remained steady and has not been positively or negatively affected by the pandemic.

These graphs show how quickly Shein has encroached on the territory of one of its most-established rivals. In September, the Shein app saw 10.3 million downloads globally from across the App Store and Google Play. In comparison, Zara’s mobile app saw 2 million.

Price Discrepancy and Other Factors

How has Shein been able to be so successful? As a fast-fashion company, Shein is able to source products at a fractional price and offer these products to consumers at low prices, when compared to competitors. The graph below shows the average price of a single piece of clothing on each brand’s website.

Y-axis “price” represents the average price of one piece of clothing, gathered from a randomly selected sample of 100–150 items from each brand’s website.

The price discrepancy across different apparel brands is undeniable. According to a randomly selected sample of 100–150 items including tops, bottoms, dresses, jackets, Zara’s prices are nearly 6x those of Shein, and Reformation’s prices are more than 2x more expensive than Zara’s and nearly 12x those of Shein.

In a time when fashion trends are constantly evolving, consumers look for low prices so they are able to keep up with what is “in” at any given moment. This suggests that despite the benefits of shopping sustainably, fast fashion’s low prices provide too much of an incentive.

Even beyond pricing, factors like the number of product offerings and the frequency of new styles uploaded to websites can also make customers more inclined to purchase from fast-fashion brands like Shein.

Sentiment Analysis

Does the everyday consumer really care about sustainability when there are so many factors that make fast fashion an attractive choice? To answer this question, we will turn to Reddit to conduct sentiment analysis on the comments associated with terms like “sustainable fashion” and “fast fashion”. The graphs below show the sentiments associated with comments scraped using the two search terms under the subreddit “r/sustainablefashion.”

Around 1500 comments were scraped for each search term. Searches were limited to the subreddit r/sustainablefashion in order to limit the scope of comments to only those most relevant to the conversation around fashion and sustainability.

This analysis found that the average sentiment was 0.9942 for comments associated with “sustainable fashion”, while the average sentiment was 0.8737 for comments associated with “fast fashion”. The former is slightly higher, which could suggest that Redditors have a more positive sentiment towards sustainable fashion compared to fast fashion, although both phrases contain a positive sentiment, which is surprising because we would expect fast fashion to have more of a negative connotation.

These findings suggest that while there are many negative aspects to fast fashion, at least the audience and target group represented by Reddit does not necessarily have strong views on either fast fashion or sustainable fashion. While Reddit provides a diverse set of voices, additional data collected from other sources and platforms could possibly shed more light on public sentiment around the topic of ethical consumption in fashion.

Conclusion

While individuals have become more aware of the implications surrounding fast fashion and mass consumption, there are still some ways to go before sustainable fashion is adopted on a large scale. Many factors like price and range of products make fast fashion an attractive choice for individuals who cannot afford to invest in sustainable pieces or those who like to consistently stay on-trend. As suggested by Reddit user comments, general public sentiment around fast fashion and sustainable fashion remains fairly neutral. We can only hope that with time, as accessibility to sustainable fashion grows, individuals will continue to move away from supporting fast fashion and limit their consumption.