Hi there, longtime Good On You readers and new friends. A few weeks back, we asked you a few simple questions. We intended to use your input to shape our editorial principles (which we did). But we never thought we’d hear from so many of you.
We’ve spent hours combing through your input to the survey, and several big themes emerged. The process made us feel a little less alone, too.
So, this week, when pressure to shop is at its highest, we want to skip the sanctimony and instead hear from you, in your own words, about how weird it is navigating this whole mess.
Thanks for reading! Find your responses below.
JD and Amy
“Consumers don’t care,” they say
There's a puzzle at the heart of conversations around so-called sustainable fashion. Surveys consistently show a lot of people care about environmental and labour justice issues. Many say they'd pay more for “better” options. And yet ultra-fast fashion brands continue to grow. The gap between what people say they value and how they behave has a name: the intention-behaviour gap.
The puzzle isn't that the gap exists. You know it does. We're all walking contradictions, living in systems that make hypocrites of us whether we like it or not; it’s why I never liked the term “conscious consumers,” anyway. That’s no excuse, either. The puzzle is, instead, how we explain it. There are two commonly repeated answers.
The first explanation tends to come from industry: “Consumers don’t really care,” I've heard so many executives say behind closed doors. All that stated concern evaporates the moment someone sees a £4 crop top, the explanation goes. They cite the growth of brands like Shein and marketplaces like Temu, as well as the H&Ms and Zaras before them. This framing shifts accountability onto shoppers, the same way BP coined “carbon footprint” to shift blame from oil companies to individuals. If consumers don't care, why should corporations change? It’s a deflection that allows those with the most power to avoid responsibility.
There are crucial distinctions between someone buying out of necessity and someone buying hauls and hauls for sport.
The second comes from certain corners of the left, and it verges on nihilism: “There's no ethical consumption under capitalism,” so individual choices don't matter, right? But this flattens crucial distinctions between someone buying out of necessity and someone buying hauls and hauls for sport while letting last season’s styles rot in a landfill.
Both are incomplete. The first ignores that opting out of this system can be expensive and inaccessible. The gap lives in a system designed to make us act against our stated values while punishing us for the outcome. The second ignores that many people in Europe, North America, Australia and so forth are among the world’s richest 10%. Many do have choices, and those choices compound.
Consumer surveys don't help when they measure choices in a vacuum. They ask if you care, if you'd pay more. But do they ask if you have more to pay? What size you wear? Whether you're navigating impossible trade-offs between feeding your family and clothing them? When behaviour diverges from stated values, it gets framed as apathy or hypocrisy.
You told us a more nuanced story
As it turns out, we did an incredibly simple survey of our own a few weeks ago. We never intended to publish any of the results. Our goal was to get to know our readers better, because we all have quite a lot in common. We thought this would be a way to decide on coverage areas for the next few months. But we didn’t expect you to share so much.
Hundreds of you responded — 361 in total — when we asked you: What's keeping you up at night? Many of you wrote paragraphs. We heard from librarians and priests in training; fashion students losing hope about their careers; plus-size people dealing with fashion’s fatphobia; parents drowning in worries about toxic chemicals in clothes; people whose friends think they’re overreacting when they try to avoid brands that exploit workers. Different generations, from all over the world, grappling with a lot of the same fashion and ethical quandaries.
When I read the results, I had to show Amy: you’ve got to see this. Then we each read everything you shared. It felt like we were reading diary entries, like we were sharing one big thought bubble filled with many of the same worries. It also made me feel less alone. Having edited reporting on this stuff for years, you can start to feel a bit demoralised. The burnout among journalists covering this beat is real. You told us that you’re not checked out. You’re awake to the problems, and that feels like navigating a maze.
Reading your responses felt like we were sharing one big thought bubble filled with many of the same worries. It also made me feel less alone.
What follows is a sampling of your words — anonymised and lightly edited. They’re sometimes diaristic entries, other times open-ended questions that speak to deeper dilemmas. I’ve mapped your responses to seven big themes that emerged — the stuff your mind wonders to when you’re feeling anxious about the problems. To me, they capture what it actually feels like in the grey areas we live in, somewhere between intention and behaviour.
The 7 big things keeping you up at night
1. The mountains of textile waste
What the hell are we going to do with these mountains of clothes?
The horrible thought of mountains of discarded fast fashion piling up in countries unable to defend themselves, dumped there to rot.
I get nauseous thinking about the fact that we have clothes to last centuries. Even if we stop making them now.
Will we drown in the detritus of our disposable society?
2. How fashion manipulates us all
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.
I really get the chills when I see influencers filming their “haul” of clothes or makeup. And the worst thing is that they influence others to buy more stuff too. And then people say they can't change the world because they are just one person, while overconsumption is one of the biggest problems. I hope that people will start to look at themselves instead of pointing their fingers at fashion brands, saying they have to change. No, you have to buy less and make the switch possible.
I'm at my last year of a master's degree in clothing design. I'm working with wardrobe studies as a tool for analysing ownership, as well as talking with psychologists to understand the habitual accumulation we are all too familiar with. It is a lot to swallow and I often feel like I'm drowning, as I've been drowning in my own wardrobe. As Jean-Paul Sartre said: I am what I have.
3. The barriers and the biases
Trying to keep myself clothed on a low income without wasting money and harming the environment with fast fashion.
As a plus-size person, how can I have fun with fashion without having to rely upon fast fashion brands (which sometimes have more to offer in inclusive sizes)?
I am training as a priest in the Church of England and am interested in how to lovingly lead people on a low income who have much bigger concerns than sustainable fashion, e.g., how to buy new school uniforms for three kids when you can hardly afford to feed them.
I am over 60, and I would like to see coverage of fashion that includes older people (don't assume every consumer is in their teens or 20s).
Why can't I find clothes of the quality I bought years ago? Carefully sewn zippers, good linings, bound buttonholes, French seams, real hems with allowances for alteration, buttons that are not plastic. It's depressing to see how synthetics have crept into brands that formerly used pure fibres.
I see so many people in my city walking with Primark and Zara bags because no ‘sustainable’ option can compete with those prices. I am a student on a budget and I get wanting to have cute clothes that would not cost a month's worth of food or housing.
4. The overwhelming systemic problems
Why is the onus on the consumer to research and find sustainable companies?
Too much pressure has been put on consumers to right the wrongs of an industry. The question is: how do we place the responsibility back on them?
If I never gain any new clothes ever again, would that even make a difference?
How can the fashion industry live with itself, knowing the damage it's doing?
How do you compete with fast fashion when the majority of people are unwilling to make changes and would choose convenience and price over doing good? I am an independent brand owner and designer who is passionate about making the industry more ethical and sustainable, but I have become more and more disillusioned due to rising costs, competition from fast fashion and a lack of support for smaller brands trying to do things right.
The whole B Corp greenwashing thing is concerning. I used to trust it to help me make ethical buying choices, but now it seems pretty worthless.
If it is so cheap, how much are all the workers making along the entire production line?
I just can't stop thinking about all the underpaid people who make our clothing in unsafe conditions, just so that we can have items we don't even need for a little cheaper.
The folks who sew fashion items don't make a living wage, and the manufacturing of fabric is poisoning their environment because of our fashion habits.
I want brands to be honest: Are there children making my clothes?
I want to hear more from the folks who grow, weave, dye, pattern and sew the fabrics into garments!
6. Feeling alone in the whole process
I'm 74 years old and retired from a career as a school librarian. Most of my life I shopped secondhand and thrift stores, sometimes raising the ire of colleagues. “Aren't you taking cheap goods from the hands of needy people?” That wasn't my goal at all. I felt early on that Americans bought too much, and almost always wanted it cheap.
Why are my friends so blissfully unaware of the corrupt nature of the fast fashion industry while I'm constantly anxious about how my fashion choices affect the climate and other people?
How do I convince friends and family to avoid fast fashion without shaming them?
I'm part of a climate action group that doesn't acknowledge fashion as a sustainability issue. I've tried sharing articles with them, but they focus more on heat pumps and government subsidies for technological changes. I agree that support for technological change in housing and transportation is important. But one thing all of us can do to help the environment is to purchase and care for our clothing in a responsible, ethical way. How do we get this message out?
How do we convince people, in rich countries especially, that they need less?
7. What’s at stake for the future
Are we really OK destroying our children’s futures through such shallow choices?
I’m just a mother thinking about the future planet I leave for my children.
It feels like we are all lemmings heading over the cliff.
How do we stop this?!
I'm a fashion student and would like more hope for my future career.
Like anyone else, I am just coping with wanting to do the right thing and dressing. Which is a crazy dichotomy and seems insane, but here we are!
And of all the responses, we widely grinned when we read this one:
I’m a kid and I want to still have a functioning planet when I’m grown up.
