TikTok's newest shopping feature is destroying the planet

It's not that young people don't want to shop sustainably: Three-quarters of Gen Zers say that sustainability is more important to them than brand name, according to a survey by First Insight and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. But despite their stated preferences, the actual buying habits of young shoppers are fueling a planetary crisis.

A recently released report on Gen Z by the online vintage-resale platform ThredUp found that while 65% of Gen Z respondents said they want to shop more sustainably and buy higher-quality clothing, one-third also described themselves as addicted to fast fashion, and more than two in five said they buy clothes that they're likely to wear only once. Researchers from Sheffield Hallam University in England found that despite their preference for sustainable clothing, 90% of young Brits still opt for fast fashion — and only 16% of those surveyed could name a single sustainable-fashion brand.

As Gen Zers get older, richer, and make up more of the fashion industry's market share, their habits have the potential to affect the industry for good — or ill. And pushing the fashion industry to be more sustainable is key in the fight against climate change: At our current rate, the fashion industry is on track to consume 26% of the world's carbon budget by 2050. And clothing production contributes 20% of all global wastewater, with an anticipated 50% increase in greenhouse-gas emissions from the industry by 2030.

Fast fashion — the most environmentally damaging business model — prioritizes the quick design, manufacturing, and marketing of astronomically large quantities of clothing, using low-quality materials to replicate current fashion trends in affordable styles. Brands like Missguided and Fashion Nova dominated fast fashion's Instagram era, releasing about 1,000 new styles a week. Now, the TikTok-favorite Chinese brand Shein has stepped on the accelerator, adding anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 individual styles to its app each day, according to an investigation by Rest of World. That overproduction of styles creates a huge amount of waste: 100 million tons of clothes are tossed out each year.

Based on their preferences, young people seem to understand how important shopping sustainably is, so why are they still so addicted to fast fashion?

The Gen Z paradox

Gen Z's economic power is growing faster than other generations, according to Bank of America. By 2030, as more of the generation begins working, their income is predicted to account for over a quarter of the world's income. By 2031, they will surpass the income of millennials. And what are young people spending their money on? In the US, fashion is the preferred category for entertainment spending among Gen Z, outranking dining out, video games, and music.

The market-research firm Mintel found that younger generations tend to outspend older generations on fashion. And more of the clothes they buy go to waste: In the UK, 64% of 16- to 19-year-olds said they have purchased clothes that they have never worn, compared with 44% of all adults surveyed. Plus, the clothes they buy aren't usually from sustainable brands. A 2021 McKinsey survey found that 42% of American Gen Zers said they didn't even know what makes clothes sustainable.

"I feel like with Gen Z there's sort of like dissonance where we say we care about sustainability, but then all of the Gen Z influencers who are influencing millions of people are telling us to go to these fast fashion brands that are only making things to be worn like three times," Estella Struck, 22, who founded a marketing agency focused on sustainable brands, said.

Malthe Overgaard and Nikolas Rønholt, researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark, published a study in 2020 on the contradiction, which they called "The Fast Fashion Paradox," to understand how consumers were thinking about what they buy. More than half of participants either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, "I like it, I buy it," to describe their clothing-consumption behavior. One participant said that liking the clothes "is the most important thing," adding that they will buy cheap clothes they like even if they weren't sustainably made. Overgaard and Rønholt concluded the reason for the discrepancy between Gen Z's preference for sustainable fashion and their behavior was mainly because of cost. "The low prices offered by fast fashion retailers were articulated as something that affected their attitude in the sense that they were willing to compromise with their attitude towards sustainability," they wrote in their report.

This was certainly the case for Katie Robinson, a 24-year-old student, who told me that her fast-fashion purchases are driven by economic necessity. "I didn't have money to shop sustainable alternatives," she told me. "With the cost-of-living crisis, young people also often have student debt and don't have well-paying jobs. You're not able to afford these really expensive, sustainable alternatives. You can either shop secondhand or you can just fall into the fast-fashion trappings and there's not any other options."

A 2022 survey, commissioned by Earthtopia, one of the world's largest eco-communities on TikTok, found 96% of UK Gen Z and millennial consumers feel the high cost of living is preventing them from making sustainable purchases.

While money is a huge factor, it isn't the only explanation for young people's addiction to cheap brands. After all, consumers are buying 60% more than they did in 2000 and keeping it only half as long according to McKinsey. Consumer psychologist Kate Nightingale believes that this paradox is the result of the "intention behavior gap." She explained that "intentions are great, even attitudes are great, but they don't necessarily result in action."

Nightingale believes Gen Z are particularly susceptible to this paradox because their identities are still developing and so they're more easily influenced, especially by social media. "They're going to be naturally much more prone to impulsive shopping, which can be very easily triggered by the way that shopping on social media and other sort of similar platforms is designed," she said.

The live-shopping rabbit hole

For the environmentally aware generation, the viselike grip of fast fashion has been fueled by social media. "You literally can't go on TikTok or Instagram without being sold to," Robinson, who runs a TikTok about sustainable fashion, said. "It's just consumerism all the time. Especially when they're integrating these easy shopping features into the platform — it removes all barriers for you."

One of those shopping features — live shopping — has made it much harder to resist buying unnecessary clothes. Instead of shopping at your leisure in a physical store or on a brand's website, live shopping makes buying clothes a time-sensitive experience. Individual sellers or representatives for fashion brands sell their products on a livestream on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. The sellers interact with the audience in real time, showing off their products and answering questions people put in the comments. These sessions often include specialty items, flash sales, or special discounts that disappear when the livestream is over. And if someone wants to buy something, they never have to leave the app. It often only takes a few clicks.

TikTok has been testing its live-shopping feature, which has exploded in popularity in China, where the most popular influencers are able to sell more than $1 billion worth of goods in a single broadcast, The Financial Times reported. It's also massively popular in the UK — and soon it's coming to the US. Robinson is based in the UK and said that as soon as her TikTok account gained followers, she started to get invitations to participate in TikTok's shopping feature. "I would get a push notification every week saying 'join TikTok shop and you can grow a following because we'll get eyes on it,'" she said.

Part of why the model, described as "the new QVC," is so successful is because it's frictionless. Nightingale explained that when we shop normally there is a lot of "meaningless friction" such as cumbersome website design or waiting in checkout lines in a physical store. But on a livestream, there's not much time to consider what you're buying. Because it's so instantaneous, live shopping encourages the buy-now, think-later approach that fast-fashion companies profit from. Lauren Bravo, an author and journalist, explained how this kind of shopping is flattening the difference between what we like, want, and need. "You can see a dress and think, 'I really like that,' in the same way that you can like a painting or a flower, but it doesn't mean you necessarily want it and it definitely doesn't mean that you need it," she said. "I think what these social-media apps are trying to do is flatten all of those different emotions so that we interpret everything as need."

A 2021 Mckinsey report found that companies have reported conversion rates — meaning the percentage of potential customers who end up buying something — from live shopping that are up to 10 times higher than conventional e-commerce. TikTok's own report on its live-shopping feature found that 67% of users said TikTok inspired them to shop even when they weren't planning to. "That idea that you can click and buy something immediately within an app, I think is quite dangerous," Bravo said.

In addition to pushing people to buy more clothes, the buy-now, think-later model of live shopping also encourages people to buy clothes that are worse for the planet. The model lends itself well to the ultra-fast-fashion labels that produce endless styles and lure in young customers with popular influencers and tantalizing discounts — leaving no time to question what this rate of consumption is doing to the planet. One compilation of TikTok live-shopping streams recently went viral because sellers were left stumped when questioned about the environmental impact of the cheap clothes they were selling. One seller, when asked why the clothes were so cheap, responded, "Don't even question it guys." Another boasted that the clothes she was selling are "cheaper than Shein."

Cutting through the noise

For Gen Z to really live up to their reputation as the green generation, cutting back on the endless scrolling is an important step. Shopping in brick-and-mortar stores can help anyone pause and think more critically about what they're buying to limit overconsumption. As Bravo noted, waiting in a crowded checkout line with music blaring is enough to make any shopper question how much they truly want the items in their basket.

After shopping fast fashion throughout her teens, Estella Struck wanted to try to close the gap between Gen Z's desire to shop sustainably and their fast-fashion habits. "It seems like Gen Z are backed into a corner where we have to trade off between caring about the planet or being fashionable, and that bridge needs to be closed," Struck said. To solve that problem, she founded Viviene New York in 2022, a Gen Z-led marketing agency that helps sustainable brands connect with Gen Z audiences through social media.

If sustainable brands jump on the live-shopping trend, Struck said, they could encourage more young people to buy the clothes they claim they want to buy. Bravo also believes there's an opportunity for these brands to create more authenticity and intimacy with their customers through the live-shopping model. "It could be a real positive thing in that we're able to have a more personal relationship with the product and potentially even the maker that you're buying from," she said. By putting eyes on more sustainable options right at the source, it could help Gen Z ultimately put their money where their mouths are.

Eve Upton-Clark is a features writer covering culture and society.