+ Why They Need To Change
I asked you, and you revealed some interesting facts about your shopping habits! I absolutely love making polls and quizzes on my Instagram stories, and I’ve done multiple polls about our shopping habits. And there are certain trends that tend to manifest themselves on every poll.
If you’d like to take part in my future polls, do make sure to follow me on Instagram. But also make sure to subscribe to my mailing list. I will be elaborating the poll results among my subscribers as well as here on the blog.
Obviously this is not any sort of scientific research. But I think it does draw a clear image of how most of us look at buying and consuming fashion these days.
Considering that the fashion industry is the second most destructive industry to this planet, in regards to pollution, our shopping habits can have a huge impact on the environment.
And we need to acknowledge that we are running out of time to radically change those habits. Only after acknowledging that, can we actually make the needed changes in our own behaviours.
First I want to go through the results from my previous poll. And after that I will draw up a conclusion. Because there’s no denying, as encouraging as some of the answers are, there are big shifts that need to happen in our shopping habits and our mindset.
Interesting Facts About Our Shopping Habits
Clothing vs. travel
I asked my followers what they would do with an extra £1000 to invest on themselves if the options were travel and clothes/accessories. Travel won this one by a landslide with 84% of respondents preferring to invest in new adventures.
I wasn’t surprised by this result, but I do have to admit that the large majority voting for travel rather than, for example, luxury goods was a bit of an eye-opener. I assume this is because very few of us see fashion as an investment.
Personally I would’ve been torn. There are some luxury pieces, which I’ve wanted to acquire for years. But I do also need money for my many travels. At the end of the day, if I really ended up with an extra £1000 right now, I’d probably direct my steps straight to Versaci’s store, and make a certain long-time product dream a reality.
Trends vs. personal style
Next I wanted to know a little bit of my followers’ values. So, I asked them which is more important in regards to clothes shopping: current trends or personal style.
Again, the result was a very clear win for ‘personal style’, a whopping 95%. This didn’t surprise me, I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who was a slave to the changing trends. People tend to go shopping and buy whatever they find pleasing to the eye at the time.
Fashion trends are a funny thing anyway, they go round and round. The wide-leg trousers are on trend every other year, and animal print seems to never be missing from the catwalk. No matter what season it is.
So, whether you follow trends or not, chances are you’re right on trend anyway.
Splurge vs. cheap
The price question is always one that I find most interesting: I’ve found that the way I form the question has a significant effect on which side the scale tips.
For example, in an earlier poll in November I asked “Do you buy fast fashion?” and the result was 52 / 48 for ‘Yes, because it’s cheap‘. Whereas here I asked the question in reverse: do you buy luxury clothes and accessories. And the result was much clearer (70%) for cheap price being a priority.
While Australia burns and we haven’t seen any snow up North this year, I find it a tad worrying that cheapness is our no.1 priority when buying clothes. Because it wasn’t so long ago when a £5 T-shirt was a ridiculous idea. More on this in a bit…
In-store vs. online
For a while now I’ve heard so many complaints how the high street is drying out and shops are closing their doors because consumers are disappearing online. But when googling this, I get firm results that actually people do still love to shop in actual stores.
To figure out how my followers, who consist of the younger generations, prefer to shop, I included this question in my poll. And the answer for in-store shopping was quite a clear one, 82%. But then I saw a fellow sustainability advocate put up the same question in her story, and her result was almost 50/50. Weird.
I wonder if this big difference in our results could be due to my much wider geographical following? My fellow blogger’s following is largely UK based, whereas I’ve got everything from the UK, US, Scandinavia, Russia, Central Europe, everywhere. Because I know that in the UK online shopping is a much bigger business than up in North, for instance.
But I don’t know, I could be wrong. Personally I found this result very satisfying, because I myself do not shop online. And the threats of high streets closing up have gotten me worried. I’m not interested in starting to shop online, I hate waiting.
Personal style vs. sustainability
The last question was a bit of a human experiment from me. Because I’ve talked about this with a lot of people, and also followed conversations around this on social media. And the picture is always quite clear.
But the answers to whether you’d compromise your personal style to save the climate turned out quite the opposite: 77% said they would be willing to adapt their style for the climate, and only 23% preferred their personal style.
Perhaps the way I set the question was a bit leading. But there’s no avoiding the fact that these answers are in complete contradiction to the answers about cheap price being a priority.
Of course we all want to save the world. But as we can see in these 2 questions, very few of us are actually willing to do anything about it.
What Needs To Change
Our mindset. And it needs to change today.
We have effectively, and quite recently, been brainwashed to think that cheap clothes are a norm. They certainly are NOT! Fast fashion as a practice and a term was established as late as in the early 90’s. Oh yes, modern slavery is only 30 years old.
Zara and H&M are the main players who basically created fast fashion, and their strategy for gaining profit in expense of actual human lives has been truly effective. Even middle-aged people do not recall how expensive fashion used to be before the 90’s.
I asked my mum about this. She couldn’t remember exact prices, but overall clothes were much more expensive than nowadays, and the selections available were substantially more scarce. And STILL people managed to survive, can you imagine!
Read also: Why I Am NOT Participating In Black Friday
Shopping habits – Conclusion
Over-consumption is a serious issue created by pure greed. But human kind has changed the system before! We sure can get rid of this destructive way of manufacturing and consuming clothes as well, right?
Just think, only 50 years ago being gay was considered a crime, and 100 years ago women weren’t able to vote, work, or go outside without a male companion. Slavery was a widely accepted practice once upon a time, whereas today it seems like insanity (for most of us, not to H&M or Zara, obviously).
Think how far we’ve come! But here we are again, the day for action and change of habits is nigh. We’ve changed the world before, we can do it again!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Did any of the poll results surprise you? Do you have some distinct shopping habits you’d like to review? Comment below and let’s discuss! ♥
