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Fashion’s role in climate change is less about what the industry makes and more about why it’s able to sell so much of it, according to research published by an academic team that describes climate change as a behavioural crisis as much as a scientific one.
It raises a key question for all of us: why are we so obsessed with new clothes? And even if we don’t want new clothes, why are brands so good at convincing us to buy them anyway?
“We buy a lot of things because we have evolutionary impulses to signal certain things about ourselves (and to acquire resources). The fashion industry creates an outlet for those impulses,” says Joseph Merz, chairman of the Merz Institute and senior fellow at the Global Evergreening Alliance.
Merz and colleagues published a study last year arguing that human behaviour is at the root of the global environmental crisis. While it’s common knowledge that climate change is man-made, the researchers wanted to explore the psychology behind what’s driving us to overconsume.
They looked at basic human needs and tendencies: to seek pleasure and avoid pain, for example; to acquire and defend resources from competitors; and to display status or sex appeal through external displays of aggression, beauty or ‘ornamentation’. These tendencies served humans at one point in time, but are no longer necessary for our survival and instead of benefiting or protecting us, they are now working against our own best interests, according to the researchers. And we’ve gotten here, they say, because those instincts have been manipulated for global economic gain that benefits some at the cost of many — and we’re hardwired not to see it.
Merz’s work, which focuses on human behaviour globally and not on fashion (or any other industry) in particular, argues that people are drawn to buying clothes and other material goods beyond what we actually need — to keep warm, for example — because we are driven to “signal” something about ourselves. The societal norms of today — consumption as a status symbol — have taught us to do this by flaunting wealth or style and newness.
“Social norms provide context for signalling,” says Merz. “I’m not going to start signalling my wealth by wearing a wooden hat.”
What this means for fashion
The applications of this research for the fashion industry span customer engagement to internal operations.
Relationships with customers are the most obvious. Fashion exists on a demand-driven model. It thrives not only because it supplies products to meet demand, but also because it spends significant resources on marketing and advertising to increase that demand perpetually.
The role of marketing is a key focus in the Merz study, which explains that marketing’s historic use was to spotlight the functional reasons to buy specific products. As markets filled with more options and competition increased, marketing evolved to help products stand out — to attract buyers who no longer needed their products but could be convinced to want them. No longer constrained by people’s actual needs, business growth could be infinitely expanded to any need they could create inside consumers’ heads.
And fashion has capitalised. Brands are estimated to spend between 5 and 10 per cent of their revenue on marketing and advertising to attract customers into their stores and to buy the latest trends. But it doesn’t need to be this way, Merz says.
Fashion wields enormous cultural influence and has the potential to transform people’s values — not only to shift away from overconsumption but actually to value and care for the planet and each other. “The fashion industry could recognise the evolutionary roots of why they have an industry — and by recognising and understanding those roots, they have the potential to radically change the way humans satisfy those impulses,” he says.
Social norms are “so incredibly fluid” and don’t need to be attached to materialistic status symbols, he adds. “There are far better ways we could be satisfying our needs and impulses.”
The research adds fuel to already growing calls for fashion to change its business model — for the industry to use the creativity it’s built on and apply it “to creative business transformation”, as Katia Dayan Vladimirova, senior lecturer at the University of Geneva and founder of the Sustainable Fashion Consumption research network, told Vogue Business earlier this year. The growing backlash against overconsumption could leave brands with little choice but to change. Merz’s team has been asked by governments around the world to present or run workshops on the behavioural crisis, and even the director general of the World Trade Organization, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has called on leaders to “rethink old growth models”. Some brands and retailers are experimenting in this direction, but momentum is needed.
Companies should see motivation in this research to adjust their business models for internal reasons as well — because employees want to feel like they work in a place that aligns with their core values and basic human instincts.
“It all comes back to stories, the stories we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves the wrong things, and it’s leading us to extinction,” he says. “But there’s potential to role model differently.”
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