Sustainable Fashion Has a Newness Problem

We all know the feeling.

The parcel notification. The ‘out for delivery’. The five-minute window where you imagine the version of yourself who wears that thing, for some reason, that person feels like the evolution of you.

Behavioural studies show dopamine spikes during anticipation - not ownership. The brain rewards the idea of change before the change even happens.

The fast fashion system did not build it’s entire structure around that accidentally.

It’s an entirely engineered behaviour tap made up of countdown timers, micro-drops, ‘just landed’, limited stock warnings, clothes feeds you won’t ever reach the end of.

Newness is the product. The clothes are almost secondary.

Trends sell micro-identity shifts.

Cottagecore. Clean girl. Mob wife. Coastal grandmother. Whatever TikTok decided this week.

In unstable times, people don’t stop wanting change. They look for small, controllable forms of it. A $15 top is cheaper than a life overhaul. Scrolling for clothes is easier than a career pivot. Newness becomes an emotional reset.

So when sustainable fashion positions itself primarily around restraint - buy less, slow down, commit forever - it’s colliding with the core psychology of the industry it’s trying to reform, which is a complete behavioural mismatch.

Fast fashion is behavioural design at scale.

It knows how to:

• Hit you at 11:47pm when decision fatigue is high

• Turn influencer styling into identity templates

• Offer enough choice that there’s always something ‘more you’ one scroll away

  
  

It reduces risk and buy in - low price, low commitment, predictable reward. If it falls apart, doesn’t fit, gets worn once, you might be annoyed, but you’re not destabilised.

Sustainable fashion, meanwhile, often asks for:

• Higher upfront investment

• Longer-term thinking

• Material literacy

• Ethical evaluation

  
  

An entire cognitive load set that generally deads impulse. If you remove newness entirely, you remove momentum, and without momentum, most people disengage.

So the question isn’t ‘how do we stop people wanting new things?’, it’s ‘how do we redesign newness?’

Ways to build newness without building waste.

Different sustainable models already have the answer - here’s how it’s done well:

Rental - access to reinvention

Rental is psychologically aligned with how modern identity works. Rental offers access to temporary reinvention, it satisfies what behavioural psychologists call self-expansion - the desire to grow or shift identity - without requiring permanent consumption.

It does this through offering high-value ‘newness’, identity flexibility, and no long-term ownership burden.

HURR for example structures its platform like a fast fashion site, you get:

• ‘New arrivals’ Occasion filters

• Curated edits

• Drop-style collections

  
  

Weddings. Races. Maternity. Ski trips. Right now, Valentines Day.

It mirrors the cognitive rhythm people are used to. Behavioural scientists call this schema alignment - when a system feels familiar, it reduces friction and perceived risk. You don’t have to learn a new shopping language.

But underneath that familiar front-end is a circular infrastructure. Successful rental brands works because they don’t ask people to stop wanting newness, they redesigns how newness is delivered.

Resale - discovery as reinvention

Resale taps into what behavioural psychologists call reward prediction error - the dopamine spike that occurs when we find something unexpectedly valuable. A hidden gem. A designer piece at a high-street price. A version of ourselves we didn’t know we were about to try on.

The best resale brands do this through offering perceived rarity, price arbitrage, and narrative flexibility. UTURN, for example, merchandises for identity, not ethics:

• Hi/low styling

• Outfit-led visuals

• Drop-style rails

• Constantly refreshed edits

Unpredictability increases engagement. Successful resale brands work because they don’t lecture about landfill, they recreate thrill. They don’t remove newness, they repackage it as discovery.

Redesign - making transformation the drop

Upcycling and repair hold the most underused newness lever of all - reinvention. They activate contrast bias - the cognitive effect where change feels more powerful when we see a clear before and after. Progress is emotionally amplified when it’s visible.

Clothing repair company The Seam shows before-and-after arcs that feel wildly relatable. Puppy-chewed shoes. Post-party disasters. Colour changes. Structural alterations. The drama is all in the revival.

It mirrors the makeover rhythm people are used to. Behaviourally, transformation stories create emotional reward because they signal growth. You’re not preserving the past. You’re upgrading it.

Upcycling and repair reduce the friction of novelty by reframing it. Instead of ‘don’t replace it’, the message becomes ‘watch what this can become’.

Successful circular brands work because they don’t frame repair as restraint. They frame it as evolution.

This article isn’t about encouraging more consumption.

Just to make that very clear. 

It’s about understanding that the desire for novelty doesn’t disappear because we ask it to. Newness is:

• Social currency

• Emotional reset

• Identity fluidity

• Momentum

If sustainable fashion positions itself purely as the responsible option, it will always feel like the sensible one. And culture rarely scales the sensible. It scales the exciting.

To me sustainable fashion is exciting, because it’s a complete reframe of how we can view fashion systems globally.

This is the space Irigai is designed for - translating sustainable systems for people who live with all the distractions and dopamine overdoses of today.

Sustainable fashion doesn’t need to feel like restraint - it can feel like evolution. And evolution, when you communicate it well, feels new.

If your brand is looking to level up their communication, let's talk.

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Let's move sustainable fashion forward.