Have you ever dreamed of having the closet and lifestyle of a successful influencer? They certainly hope so. The current social media landscape is filled with influencers showing off their perfect lives, making you want everything they own. But here’s the trick: the more influencers buy, the more they make you want to buy, and all at a pace that is not sustainable for you or the environment. Because obviously the more you buy, the more you have to throw away. Fashion is the third largest contributor to waste and environmental degradation. Each year the fashion industry produces millions of tonnes of clothing, two-thirds of which end up in the landfill just one year after production. The pressure created by influencers to keep up with trends and have an ever-rotating closet places an unsustainable financial and environmental burden on consumers and the planet.
Most influencers make their money from advertisements, transforming them into a brand and their lifestyle of product. Through endless lists of “must buy accessories” they are suggesting that that one new lipgloss (or t-shirt or workout set or lamp or drawer organizer…) will give you the perfect life you aspire to.
Algorithms like the Tik Tok For You page and the Instagram Explore Page are designed to serve this up to you in quantities and intensities that make it almost impossible not to desire, and warp your understanding of sustainable consumption. FOMO, or the fear of missing out, does not just apply to parties. Studies have shown that the desire to mimic influencers, and the fear of missing out on the hot trend or your outfit looking outdated (the horror!) drive impulsive online shopping.
To keep up with even that most basic of fashion trends, you have to constantly be buying new clothes that will soon be horrifically outdated. This means feeding into the exploitative and destructive fast fashion system and or running up credit card debt.
Recently, even influencers are revealing how much credit card debt they’ve created trying to sell their lifestyle. The average American has over 6,000 dollars in credit card debt and the number keeps rising. Whether that number comes from just trying to survive or compulsive shopping, buying more clothes does not help. A lot of influencers also receive free clothes or return their hauls, meaning they don’t carry the financial burden you might. Given the high cost of constantly buying clothes, consumers are turning to fast fashion companies to buy almost disposable clothing. Shein now accounts for 40 percent of the clothes Americans buy, and its revenue rose 20 percent from 2022 to 2023 and has continued to grow at that rate. But your cheap clothes are subsidized by exploitative labor, synthetic fabric, and massive environmental destruction.
Fast fashion describes the cheaply produced clothes that mimic catwalk or trendy pieces and the rapid speed at which they go from conception to your house. A traditional clothing store like American Eagle will produce 1,000 styles a year, original fast fashion stores like H & M or Zara will produce 20,000, and Shein, the fastest of fast fashion stores, produces over 1.5 million. All those pieces take massive amounts of water and fiber to produce, create microplastics, and release carbon both in their production and transportation. And on top of that they destroy habitats to grow more cotton and rely on unethical, often child labor for their cheap prices.
The challenge is that you probably know this — I definitely do — but that doesn’t stop me enviously watching Instagram Reels (let me believe this is better than Tik Tok) of influencers with a new outfit for each party. Life is obviously a battle between doing what is fun and what is moral, and in fashion those ends are very far apart. Influencers are slowly realizing that we see through these tactics, and many have started partnering with more ethical (or less disgustingly unethical) brands, or opting to rent clothes for events instead of buying. As consumers, we all have the power to make small changes — even buying a couple shirts less a year or choosing to thrift, rent or swap most of our clothes. Even just stepping off social media for a bit and working on building personal style helps. It means you have the power and knowledge to choose if you really like that new trendy shirt or if you want to stick to the clothes you already have.
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