Between appalling labour practices, opaque supply chains and environmental devastation, fast fashion has been widely condemned in recent years.
“Slow fashion” has been positioned as an antidote to fast fashion, promoting reduced consumption, more ethical brands and second-hand markets. Indeed, there are signs of a broader cultural shift, with influencers and celebrities increasingly criticised for promoting brands such as Shein, and overconsumption becoming less socially acceptable. This shift has growing potential to influence consumer behaviour as these attitudes surrounding fast fashion consumption become more widespread.
Yet in its current form, the slow fashion movement has not proven sufficient to lessen the harms associated with the industry. In fact, this cultural shift has coincided with a deteriorating picture of global fashion production.
The industry’s environmental impact has worsened, as sustainability and recycling initiatives have failed to offset rising levels of consumption and output. In addition, exploitation is worsening in areas of fast fashion supply chains with the rise of ultra-fast fashion platforms such as Shein and Temu. Research has shown that these ultra-fast fashion platforms operate by pushing production costs as low as possible, placing continuous downward pressure on the prices paid to suppliers. Reports from factories describe being pushed to cut prices repeatedly, with some facing financial instability, debt, or closure. Factories are therefore forced to produce cheaper and faster, or risk losing contracts altogether. The consequences of having to operate on increasingly thin margins are being passed down to vulnerable workers through lower wages and poorer conditions.
Central to the slow fashion movement has been the idea of boycotting fast fashion brands. In principle, boycotts aim to inflict financial loss on companies in order to pressure them into changing their behaviour. For this to occur, however, boycotts must be widespread and sustained enough to significantly reduce demand.
This is particularly difficult to achieve in the fast fashion industry. The majority of brands exhibit the kinds of practices that slow fashion advocates seek to challenge, albeit to varying degrees, making it unclear where such boycotts should begin and end. This lack of clarity is compounded by the opacity of fast fashion supply chains, where production processes are fragmented and poorly disclosed, leaving consumers to navigate a spectrum of comparatively better and worse practices rather than a clear distinction between ethical and unethical options. This makes coordinating meaningful collective action challenging. The absence of clearly defined and widely agreed-upon targets has meant that boycotts often function more as expressions of solidarity and personal ethics, rather than effective tools for collective economic pressure, allowing the broader industry to continue largely unchanged. In doing so, it risks reinforcing the perception that individual purchasing decisions carry little weight and intensifying the collective action problem that limits their effectiveness.
While broader industry-wide boycotts may be difficult to coordinate and sustain, their effectiveness may be greater when directed at more clearly defined targets. In this context, the case for boycotting the most extreme forms of ultra-fast fashion appears strong, as targeting platforms such as Shein and Temu offers a clearer opportunity for improving industry conditions, given their role in accelerating downward pressure on supplier payments across the industry.
While there is potential for such a movement to significantly reduce demand for ultra-fast platforms, demand cannot realistically be expected to disappear entirely as buying from these low-cost brands is often a rational response to financial constraints, particularly in a cost-of-living crisis. However, even under a well-coordinated but partial boycott, these firms may not respond by improving conditions. Instead, they may cut prices further, shift costs elsewhere in the supply chain, or focus on more price-sensitive consumers who do not boycott. As long as these ultra-fast fashion companies continue to operate on a model of rock-bottom pricing, anchoring the market at extremely low price points, downward pressure on supplier payments is likely to persist across the industry.
Thus, if even a relatively successful boycott does not ensure a significant improvement, it becomes difficult to justify placing responsibility on individual consumers. If consumer action alone is insufficient to drive meaningful change, attention must instead turn to how the industry itself is regulated.
Moves towards regulation are already beginning to take shape. The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive aims to make companies responsible for labour and environmental conditions within their supply chains, shifting the burden away from consumers and onto firms themselves. Yet the February 2026 “Omnibus” revision significantly diluted these measures, most notably through the removal of EU-level civil liability, which would have allowed affected workers and communities to seek compensation where companies failed to prevent harm. Without such provisions, companies may be required to demonstrate due diligence, but face far weaker consequences when that due diligence falls short.
If regulation is to serve as a genuine alternative to boycotts, it must not only require companies to assess risks, but also ensure they are held accountable when harm occurs in their supply chains. This suggests that the focus of the slow fashion movement may need to shift from what people buy to how companies are regulated and how this regulation is shaped.
If consumers cannot realistically boycott their way to better conditions in the fashion industry, the burden should not just fall on individuals to shop more ethically, but on legislators to set and enforce standards that hold companies accountable for conditions within their supply chains.
