We love style too. But when we think about the fashion industry and all of its problems, we look like this.
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Fashion media answers to advertisers. We answer to you
Hey there! Back in November, we asked readers to tell us about themselves: what you care about, what keeps you up at night when it comes to fashion and consumer culture. 361 of you responded.
We published your voices in our reader survey feature, but there's another thing that’s been on our minds ever since.
Here’s what happened when we asked you to pick statements that made you feel seen:
59% said “I need the fashion industry to change.”
53% said “I care more about craft and design than trends.”
50% said “I want to understand what’s really happening behind the scenes.”
50% said “I love style but the fashion industry gives me the ick.”
That last one, in particular, resonated. We’ve lived inside this tension for years in different fashion and media roles.
Half of you are holding two contradictory things at once. You genuinely care about clothes — about design, about getting dressed as something more than utility — and you also can’t stomach what the industry does.
Half of you say you genuinely care about clothes but can’t stomach what the industry does
You’re not looking for more reasons to feel bad. You want someone to help make sense of it all, do the reporting that holds the industry to account, ask the right questions, and build something that isn’t captured by the brands it covers.
But the mainstream media model doesn’t enable this kind of work. Rather, the advertising-dependent, access-driven fashion system actively suppresses it.
That frustration is part of why we launched anxiety.eco. And it’s why we’re asking you to help us become reader funded. That’s the only way to ensure we answer to you.
What we’ve been doing
In the three months since we launched, we’ve published some hits including:
The Ultra-Rich List: We researched the 80-plus fashion billionaires whose fortunes would take a garment worker on a typical salary hundreds of millions of years to earn.
Stella McCartney and H&M: Can a sustainability icon really change fast fashion from within? (Hm…)
Toxic chemicals in ultra fast fashion (Founding Member exclusive): How loopholes in EU legislation let retailers like Shein keep selling clothes that break safety limits.
How the fur bans happened (Founding Member exclusive): In 90 days, Condé Nast, Hearst, New York Fashion Week, Poland, and Rick Owens all banned fur. We spoke with campaigners to understand how collective action won.
If we can achieve our goal of being majority reader-funded, then we can keep the pressure on. Fashion’s problems aren’t going away, after all. What we’ve done so far gives you a taste of the work that your support and attention makes possible.
“The most real and refreshing thing in a long time”
Many of you have noticed the difference:
Can honestly say this is the most real and refreshing thing I’ve seen online in a very long time. I love the idea that you are still trying to make it accessible to as many people as possible free of charge.
I have confidence that the things written in it are real reports and not just sponsored ads disguised as journalism. Please keep posting real coverage when all other media outlets just praise fast fashion.
It’s so refreshing and thought provoking. I enjoy that it’s not peppered with affiliate links or adverts, and genuinely look forward to the emails landing in my inbox.
Authentic and personal takes about sustainable/ethical fashion from people with experience in the field.
We want to keep doing this for years to come. If you do too:
Confession: we lose money on every post
We should be honest with you. We’re losing money on anxiety.eco.
Every email costs us to send. Hosting, tools, subscriptions to services that make this work possible all add up, and we currently pay more than £4,000 in annual expenses just to send free newsletters. That’s before we’ve even paid ourselves anything for the hours of reporting, editing, and fact-checking that goes into each piece. (And so far, we’ve invested hundreds of hours of our own time because we believe this matters.)
Some of our friends think we’re possibly making a career mistake for launching an independent fashion media company in 2026. The media business is brutal right now. Reader-funded journalism is really hard to make sustainable. The odds are probably against us.
But the odds are worse if nobody tries. And when we read your survey responses, we thought: these are our people. Might as well give it our best shot.
The odds are probably against us… but the odds are worse if nobody tries
Does better fashion media even matter?!
With everything else happening in the world, a cynic might ask: does independent fashion media really matter right now?!
Well, we think you’re here because you already know the answer. But let’s say it anyway.
Fashion is one of the most exploitative industries on Earth. It shapes how we see ourselves. It employs millions of workers in conditions most of us would find intolerable. It’s a major contributor to fossil fuel emissions, which continue to grow as we produce more cheap clothes every year than the human population can even wear. And the media that covers it makes the problem worse: laundering reputations and promoting lifestyles that aren’t compatible with planetary boundaries.
If we want fashion to change, the media that covers it has to change too. That won’t come from billionaire-owned publications or advertiser-dependent outlets. It has to come from readers who decide this work should exist.
🔵 Back this work today, get 25% off for life
We launched our Founding Member drive with an ambitious goal: 500 Founding Members. Zero billionaires.
Why join now? You’ll lock in launch pricing before it goes up, you’ll be part of the first cohort to help shape what we cover, and you’ll get access to everything we’re building — including some things we haven’t announced yet.
Launch pricing is 25% off for a limited time:
Founding Member: £74.25/year (about £6 a month, roughly the price of a fancy oat milk latte)
Lifetime Member: £336.75 (plus 2 annual memberships to gift)
What you get:
No paywalls — full access to everything we publish.
Ask us anything — submit questions, we’ll answer them in future issues.
Virtual Founders Forum — the virtual shindig! A live session where we share what’s coming and take your questions.
Your name in our public thank-yous — if you want it there, because you help build this.
No ads, ever.
Your support keeps more reporting free for everyone who can’t afford to pay, because we believe free access matters too. Your support helps cover our costs. And your support means worker-owned fashion media has a real shot.
The antidote is collective. Thank you!
JD and Amy
P.S. Can’t afford it right now? You can still help.
We get it. Here’s how to support anxiety.eco without spending money:
Leave us a testimonial (takes 2 mins!) — This is the easiest, quickest way to support.
Keep reading and sharing — Forward to a friend, post on social, send in a group chat. It makes our day.
Word of mouth — Tell someone IRL who’d care about this. This is the big one.
Every one of these helps. Genuinely.
