As of earlier this month, TikTok users can purchase Amazon products advertised on the social media platform without leaving the app. It’s a move the partners say will “create a frictionless shopping experience” for TikTokers to “discover, browse and buy”. Several other new media-retail tie-ups have been announced in the weeks since, designed to make it easier to shop: YouTube creators can now leverage affiliate links with an expanded brand network via Shopify, and viewers of the Netflix show Emily in Paris can purchase the main character’s notoriously outlandish outfits via Google Lens.
These partnerships are testament to fashion’s new reality, says Simar Deol, foresight analyst at strategic consultancy The Future Laboratory, and they’re only the beginning. “Consumers have expectations for instantaneous retail opportunities from gaming to social media,” she explains.
But sustainability advocates are concerned that such partnerships — like many other forces, particularly on social media, that are already in play — are going to push consumer behaviour further in the wrong direction. Not only do they participate in enabling overconsumption, they almost incentivise it, critics say.
“Social media has reduced the friction to overconsumption,” says Dr Barry Schwartz, professor emeritus of psychology at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice. But friction, he explains, isn’t just what slows things down; it’s a necessary level of inefficiency that serves as an “insurance policy” against unintended consequences and unexpected events.
Friction can also be a safeguard against impulse purchases, which experts say contribute to overconsumption — those items that people buy on a whim but will never actually wear, or thought would fit into and don’t. “When you remove barriers to purchasing — such as purchasing in-app or with a single click — you remove the cooling-off period that might stop people from acting on these impulses,” says Dr Regina Frei, professor of sustainable and circular systems within the Fashion, Textiles and Technology Institute at University of the Arts London (UAL).
he e-commerce companies involved reject the notion of a link between their partnerships and overconsumption. Shopify says its YouTube deal is intended to help merchants connect with consumers in places they are already shopping. Likewise, Amazon says its partnership with TikTok is designed to provide customers with an opportunity to discover new brands and products, and make purchases in a way that’s convenient for them — “just as retailers have done for many years by placing ads for popular products on TV, in newspapers and online.” (Netflix, Google and YouTube did not respond to requests for comment, and TikTok declined to comment.)
These partnerships thrive by meeting consumers where they are, identifying existing impulses and making them easier to indulge. Can sustainability do the same thing, but in the opposite direction?
Understanding consumer behaviour
First, we need to understand why people overconsume. Joseph Merz, chairman of ecological overshoot research lab the Merz Institute, and senior fellow at the Global Evergreening Alliance, says it helps to frame it not as an environmental crisis but a crisis of human behaviour. We are spurred by evolutionary impulses to signal status, defend our territories and acquire resources. “Late-stage capitalism has contextualised these impulses with huge houses, private jets and shiny cars. We like to show that we can afford these things, that we have enough resources to do so, which in turn makes us more attractive to other people.”
He believes that creating “social guardrails” around overconsumption — making it as taboo as smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol or committing a crime — could be the answer to curbing it. Fashion could use its potential to influence culture and societal norms to help drive this; something that the UN Environment Programme has already called on fashion to do through its guidance encouraging fashion communicators to lend their skills to defining and glamourising what it calls a “1.5-degree lifestyle”.
More proactive efforts are needed, too. If the mainstream industry can intervene in the market to encourage consumption, those in the sustainability sphere can intervene to reduce it. Content creator Abigail Roe created ‘deliberation station’ and ‘think tank’ worksheets to guide people through purchasing decisions and decluttering by asking targeted questions such as: where will this item be in five years? Is this the best way for me to obtain it? Does it solve a problem that I have genuinely noticed? Operating under the moniker Downsize Upgrade, Roe says her process is designed to help people slow down their decision-making, and untangle impulse purchases based on manufactured wants from thoughtful purchases based on genuine needs.
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