Exit from the High Street: An exploratory study of sustainable fashion pioneers

In today's marketplace, dominated by business models predicated on continual consumption and globalized production systems that have major environmental and social impacts, the concept of 'sustainable fashion' takes on an almost paradoxical quality. This paper explores this paradox by focusing on a previously under-researched group of consumers – 'sustainable fashion pioneers' who actively engage and shape their own discourse around the notion of sustainable fashion. These adversary innovators actively create and communicate strategies for sustainable fashion behaviour that can overcome the nebulous and somewhat paradoxical situation that sustainable development presents. Specifically, we use in-depth interviews and netnography to illuminate the motivations, abilities, and facilitators or barriers that play a role in the reported behaviour of these sustainable fashion consumers. This includes such key behaviours as purchasing fewer garments of higher quality, exiting the market, by purchasing only secondhand fashion goods, and sewing or upgrading their own clothing. We identify key themes that appear to both fuel and support such behavioural strategies that include distrust for retailers' sustainability motives; a desire for freedom and self-expression; a belief in the necessity of reduced consumption; and distaste for fashion, a preference for style.