Sustainable Fashion Needs to Be More Like Fast Fashion
- Beth Arthurs
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Into unpopular opinions?
Mine is that sustainable fashion needs to be more like fast fashion.
Hear me out.
I started my career inside fast fashion, where trends were manufactured overnight (or however long it took for a Kardashian to post a new look). Product presentation and storytelling were weaponised to make people want.
I was part of an industry that perfected the art of attention: rapid cycles, emotionally charged marketing, and a hyper-responsive system that could turn a scroll into a sale in seconds.
I’m not saying any of that is good - I left for a reason. But it taught me something invaluable - fast fashion is a hell of a lot more than a production model. It’s a psychological engine.
It knows how to make people feel something - and that’s exactly what sustainable fashion has failed to.
Sustainable Fashion Has a Communication Problem
When I pivoted my career from fast fashion, I spent years studying how sustainability is communicated, how people interpret it, and how creative strategy might reconnect fashion to meaning.
Through client work, independent research, and hundreds of conversations, one pattern has always stood out: most people believe sustainability is important, but very few feel genuinely emotionally connected to it.
The visuals and language of sustainable fashion are too often coded in beige palettes, moralising captions, and technical jargon. The tone is instructional when it should be inspirational. It alienates more than it invites.
Fast Fashion and the Dopamine Economy
Much like fast food, fast fashion delivers a dopamine hit.
It’s engineered for the instant gratification loop our brains crave - the thrill of new, the pleasure of discovery, the subtle social validation of being in on the latest thing.
Dopamine is an anticipation chemical as much as it is a reward chemical. It spikes before we buy, not after. Fast fashion psychology plays the game of constant micro-rewards: new drops, flash sales, influencer hauls, the ‘back in stock’ ping that feels like a love language.
Every element is designed to create the feeling of novelty and belonging. Not just owning clothes - they’re unfortunately pretty irrelevant in this paradigm - it’s being part of something moving, alive, culturally fluent that is the best-selling product.
Sustainable fashion, meanwhile, tends to market the opposite of that. It sells responsibility. It speaks to conscience, not chemistry. Ethical narratives framed through guilt or fear might inform, but they rarely transform. They can make people withdraw, not act.
People buy from emotion, not guilt. They buy from what connects to their identity, their aspirations, their sense of self.
A Game of Desire
If sustainable fashion wants to grow, it can’t just demand ethical obligation - it has to compete on desire.
The next evolution of sustainability is about re-engineering the same attention systems that fast fashion dominates, but directing them toward better outcomes: longevity, creativity, and meaning.
We can reframe the dopamine loop by reshaping it. The human need for novelty, self-expression, and belonging isn’t going anywhere, but how we satisfy it can evolve.
Coming up…
If sustainable fashion wants to grow, it can’t just demand ethical obligation. It must learn what fast fashion mastered - how to make people want the change.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be diving deeper into each of some of the themes that underpin this bridge. From translating value, reframing aesthetics, communicating price to driving newness, I’ll be exploring how sustainable fashion can learn from the systems it’s trying to replace.
Find the series on our Insta.
The goal isn’t to mimic fast fashion’s flaws. It’s to master its mechanics, then use them better.
At Irigai, we help sustainable fashion brands translate their values into creative strategies that drive emotion, attention, and action.
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