The Pervasive Instability of Online Sustainable Shopping

This research advances a theorisation of the practice transformation processes that sustainably-oriented fashion consumers enact when attempting to shop sustainably online. The environmental and social costs of the fashion industry are widely acknowledged to include significant ecological and human suffering (Pal and Gander, 2018; Olson, 2022). However, limited broadscale cultural support exists for sustainable alternatives to buying new and cheap fashion products (Mukendi et al., 2020). Sustainable marketing is failing to address ‘throwaway’ consumer culture (Gupta and Gentry, 2018) and our “see-now-buy-now society” (Mukendi and Henninger, 2020, p.457). Fostering consumption change towards better sustainability is deeply challenging, despite the growth of consumer concern about climate change (Mukendi et al., 2020; Mukendi and Henninger, 2020).

Sustainably-oriented consumers’ pro-environmental behaviours are context-specific and can be contradictory (Spaargaren, 2013; Carrington et al., 2014). Accordingly, recent research suggests that sustainability is not part of fashion consumption, even for consumers with positive ‘eco-attitudes’ (Magnuson et al., 2017; Olson, 2022). Sustainability is perceived to conflict with the wide choice, low price and fast cycles that consumers expect from fashion retailers (Perry and Chung, 2016; Rausch and Kopplin, 2021) and the hedonic values it fosters.
Existing research illuminates how sustainably-oriented fashion consumers are increasingly boycotting fast fashion and forming prosumer communities (Alhashem et al., 2020; Cervellon and Wernerfelt, 2012; Shen et al., 2014). However, scant research exists on the experiences of sustainably-oriented fashion consumers who continue to navigate the challenges of fashion shopping online (Connell, 2019). Indeed, increasing numbers of people buy fashion online (Guillen-Royo, 2019) and there is growing infusion of marketing and retail with social media, which presents increasing opportunities for consumers to engage passively with fashion marketing and shopping (Nash, 2019). Further research is needed to examine what changes are required to online shopping practices in order to foster more sustainable consumption and marketing. Therefore, in this work we address the following research question: how do sustainably-oriented consumers enact online shopping practices, and how are their attempts at sustainable shopping enabled or constrained?

We address our research question using a practice theories lens (Warde, 2005), understanding online fashion shopping as a practice performed through the integration of fashion competences, the digital-material arrangements of online platforms and the shared cultural understandings about what it means to ‘do’ online fashion shopping. We focus on the way online fashion shopping is configured to understand how sustainability is locked out of this practice. Through five phases of interpretive qualitative research including 58 participants, our findings show that sustainably-oriented fashion consumers accrue a habituated ‘reflexive commitment to sustainability’, a type of critical-reactive reflexivity that builds on Thompson et al.’s (2018) reflexivity types. This reflexive commitment destabilises routinised online fashion practices, which can no longer be enjoyed as pleasurable, exciting and impulsive. Adaptation is attempted in various ways, guided by new ‘rules’ including a shift from scrolling to searching, and constricted brand constellations. Yet, sustainable online fashion shopping fails to gain traction and remains unsettled and unsatisfactory, in part due to the continuous accrual of knowledge and scepticism that fuels enhanced reflexive commitment to sustainability, and in part due to the difficulties consumers face when trying to integrate alternative sustainable goals with available online shopping practice elements.

This work contributes an original understanding of the challenges that sustainably-oriented fashion consumers face as they attempt to shop online in more sustainable ways. This contribution is significant, as it can help devise interventions and policies to support the demand for sustainable fashion and enable the fashion industry to “change its unsustainable nature” (McNeill and Moore, 2015, p.212).  

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