Dear Anxiety: How do I stop getting sucked into fast fashion and social media?

Hi there, welcome to the very first column in our new series, Dear Anxiety, where we answer your questions and, well, anxieties. 

We always knew we wanted to write a series like this (and become your favourite agony aunts), and reading the hundreds of responses to our launch survey showed that many of you have a lot of the same worries. 

You’re wondering how to make a small budget work when you’re avoiding fast fashion. You want to know how to support garment workers who’re being exploited. You want to understand what fast fashion actually means and just how we ended up here. 

And while there might not always be a simple solution, there is power in understanding how the system works, what the potential solutions are, and what (or who) is standing in the way. That’s what we’re here for.

This week, Amy answers a reader’s question on how to resist fast fashion and social media’s constant push to consume. 

Thanks for reading,

Amy and JD

Q: How do I stop getting sucked into the “your clothes aren't good enough, you need a new this-and-that to appear current” thoughts when I browse social media? As much as social media sucks in many ways, I do adore it for the fun distraction (and also education!) I get. I just hate falling into these traps sometimes. Do I really need Frye campus boots? Do I really need a new trench coat? Am I lame because I don't own horseshoe pants? I wish I could turn off the ads. I thrift often and try to thrift whenever I need a new outfit for work or an event, but it's a mental battle to not feel inadequate when fast fashion ads are constantly assaulting my eyeballs.

A: Don’t feel bad about getting sucked in. Fast fashion and social media are machines that use behavioural psychology to keep us consuming. They drive the hunger for more even when we think we’ve had enough. 

More than a decade after working in fast fashion retail, I’m still rewiring my own brain, because even when you can see all the industry’s problems up close, buying the cool thing can still be hard to resist.

I worked on the shop floor in Forever 21 to support myself during university. The brand has long been known for the abundant trend stories or “personas” that products were categorised into in its stores. With names like Lace After Dark, Punk Princess, Plaid and Poetry, they were the precursors to TikTok’s Coastal Grandmother and Mob Wife microtrends, and all had to be memorised according to greyscale Powerpoint printouts filled with Tumblr imagery. They changed seasonally but were updated with constant new arrivals wrapped in clouds of plastic that smelled of chemicals. 

Reddit users have cited the personas as a means of exploring and developing their own fashion taste, and offering enough variety to suit almost anyone. But this wasn’t about adding to your personal style or being inclusive. It was about tapping into young shoppers’ insecurities and getting them to buy a whole new wardrobe every few months. And it worked. 

Looking around the store during my shifts, I was endlessly dissatisfied with my own outfit, my wardrobe, myself. Like so much of the mainstream fashion machine, these personas were designed to create restless aspiration and a thirst for consumption – the chance to embody a New York City party girl in polyester-velvet and lace, or become the wholesome bookish fashion girlie in an acrylic houndstooth skirt and rollneck. Or better yet, both: with prices so low, why not buy it all? 

The thought of buying everything in my imaginary cart took me on a low-level dopamine rollercoaster that was easily mistaken for being “inspired” – a juicy feeling for a fashion design student. But by the end of my sales assistant era, my wardrobe was full of items that, taken out of the store’s trend contexts, meant nothing to my own style and looked dated despite being just a year or two old, not to mention were falling apart: a detached zip here, a hundred sequins falling off there.

This was all back in fast fashion’s glitziest era, when Topshop reigned on the UK’s high streets and before the tragedy of Rana Plaza made the news. But even after more mainstream consumers learned the devastating impact of fast fashion on people and the environment, the sector kept on growing, getting faster and cheaper. And as fashion got more digital, business practices became more sinister, bringing the exploitation mostly limited to supply chain workers to customers via their screens. The industry’s runaway train has blasted through our decision-making autonomy and our perception of value.

Major brands including Shein, Asos, H&M, and Zara, for instance, were found to use “dark patterns” in eCommerce in a 2022 Public Eye investigation, like forcing cookie storage on your device for advertising, pushing you shop more and quicker, to add more items to your cart to qualify for a fast-expiring discount, and leaving you no option but to create accounts and subscribe to marketing. These widespread, manipulative user-interface designs keep us stuck in the fast fashion spiral, spending irresponsibly, and we often don’t realise the extent of it.

Elsewhere online, brands employ roulette wheels, scarcity marketing, and website experiences that entice customers to treat shopping like a treasure hunt, Aysha Imtiaz wrote for the BBC in 2024. In the same report, Mark Griffiths, professor of behavioural addiction at Nottingham Trent University, likened Temu’s tactics to the way slot machines are designed to keep users playing.

Social media, too, is saturated with disingenuous pushes to buy new stuff: an influencer’s chatty haul video that has been low-key paid for by a brand, in-app shopping functions that position shopping as entertainment, and harnessing social proof through favourable review videos and live shopping with online personalities people trust, which only emphasise the link between frequent buying and belonging. 

Amidst all this our concept of value in fashion has shifted. Investing, financially and emotionally, in thoughtful design and quality manufacturing is certainly what many of our grandparents would say if we asked them about their purchasing decisions back in the day. 

Now though, it’s normal to prioritise low cost and validation when shopping. We’re buying a lot more clothes per person than our grandparents ever did, and we’re spending a lot less, in real terms, on each garment. This twisted system has taught us we should keep on buying more cheap goods to fulfill our sense of self instead of intentionally investing in fewer, better quality things that we truly love. 

Today, people are more likely to qualify their purchase by how good of a “dupe” it is, how cheap it was, or who they first saw wearing it on Instagram. Shoppers who’ve grown up with fast fashion now think about purchases in terms of social posts, and won’t risk being seen on the grid twice in the same outfit. 

I say all this because it’s worth understanding just how deep the system’s claws are designed to get into you. Your feelings of inadequacy at not owning the latest item are entirely intentional on the part of Big Fashion.

These realities are the tip of the overconsumption iceberg, and the more you learn, the more overwhelming it feels. But understanding – and seeing – how the system is designed to exploit everyone from farmers to garment workers and consumers was the scary and crucial step to rewiring my own brain.

I needed to unlearn the link between value, self-worth, and newness, and that meant purging trend-led influencers and clickbait shopping content from my digital life. 

Once they disappeared from my feed, my nagging feeling of wardrobe dissatisfaction dissipated because it was no longer front and centre. 

Reducing the amount of new clothes I buy has also helped increase my resistance to trends and fast fashion-based content. I’ve gotten an insight into my true personal style (no algorithms needed!) by learning what I’m drawn to when looking around a charity shop rather than what a curated corner of H&M tells me to buy. Not to mention realising that the same excitement of buying into a seasonal trend can be elicited by finding a new combination of items I already own. It’s taken years to stop seeing new clothes as the go-to if I do need to buy something, but concurrently, the hype around viral social media products gets to me increasingly less. And I’ve saved money, too.

Visualising the harms done by the industry is a big deal, too. Because it’s one thing to hear about discarded clothes from the UK piling up on Ghanaian beaches and another thing to see it, or the toxic smoke rising from kilns as they burn textile waste in Cambodia. We might feel a long way from garment workers risking their safety to protest and demand their unpaid wages, but when you see them on the front lines, the sector’s disregard for human rights gets a lot more real. 

It feels awkward to admit here that I worked for fast fashion brands and helped propel the practices that led to what we see in these photos. Then again, most people on the fast fashion shop floor – like I was – are predominantly women in low-paid roles. In that sense, they have a lot more in common with the garment workers exploited to make clothes than they do with the industry’s billionaire CEOs as they profit off all of us. These pictures aren’t easy to look at, but solidarity begins in remembering our human connection, and that’s where rewiring our brains starts too.