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CULTURE

The Neurological Pleasures of Fast

Fashion
Research shows that the brain finds pleasure in the pursuit of
inexpensive things, and high-street chains and online retailers sites alike
are cashing in.

By Marc Bain and Quartz

Jianan Yu/Reuters

MARCH 25, 2015 SHARE

In wealthy countries around the world, clothes shopping has become a

widespread pastime, a powerfully pleasurable and sometimes addictive activity
that exists as a constant presence, much like social media. The Internet and
the proliferation of inexpensive clothing have made shopping a form of cheap,
endlessly available entertainment—one where the point isn’t what you buy so
much as it's the act of shopping itself.

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This dynamic has significant consequences. Secondhand stores receive more

clothes than they can manage and landfills are overstuffed with clothing and
shoes that don’t break down easily. Consumers run the risk of ending up on a
hedonic treadmill in which the continuous pursuit of new stuff leaves them
unhappy and unfulfilled. For most, breaking the cycle isn’t as easy as just
vowing to buy nothing. It’s no accident that shopping has become such an
absorbing and compulsive activity: The reasons are in our neurology,
economics, culture, and technology.

Shopping is a complex process, neurologically speaking. In 2007 a team of

researchers from Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon looked at the brains of
test subjects using fMRI technology as they made decisions while out buying
clothes. The researchers found that when they showed one of the study’s
subjects a desirable object for sale, the pleasure center, or nucleus ambens, in
the subject’s brain lit up. The more the person wanted the item, the more
activity the fMRI detected.

From left: activation in the nucleus ambens (pleasure), medial prefrontal

cortex (cost-benefit analysis), and insula (pain and disgust). (Courtesy of
Scott Rick)

The researchers then showed the subject the item’s price. The medial
prefrontal cortex weighed the decision, as the insula, which processes pain,
reacted to the cost. Deciding whether to buy put the brain, as the study put it,
in a “hedonic competition between the immediate pleasure of acquisition and
an equally immediate pain of paying.” The mindset is in line with evidence
that shows happiness in shopping comes from the pursuit of goods—from the
sensation of wanting something.

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While pleasure kicks in just from the act of looking, there’s also pleasure in
purchasing, or more specifically, in getting a bargain. The medial prefrontal
cortex is the part of the brain that does what’s essentially cost-benefit analysis.
“It seemed to be responsive not necessarily to price alone, or how much I like
it, but that comparison of the two: how much I like it compared to what you
charge me for it,” says Scott Rick, one of the study’s authors, now an assistant
professor of marketing at the University of Michigan.

It's what’s called “transactional utility” says Tom RECOMMENDED READING

Meyvis, a professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School
of Business and an expert in consumer psychology. “You TV Can’t Stop Thinking
see this a lot with clothing,” he says. “Part of the joy you About the Female Gaze
SHIRLEY LI
get from shopping is not just that you bought
something that you really like and you’re going to use,
but also that you got a good deal.”
The Dark Side of Fitness
Culture
If seeing items you want and getting a bargain both SOPHIE GILBERT

elicit waves of shopping joy, you couldn’t engineer a

more pleasurable consumer culture than the modern,
globalized West. The Internet Mocked Her as
a Teenager. It’s Embracing
Her Now.
Fast fashion perfectly feeds this neurological process.
SPENCER KORNHABER
First, the clothing is incredibly cheap, which makes it
easy to buy. Second, new deliveries to stores are
frequent, which means customers always have something new to look at and
desire. Zara stores famously gets two new shipments of clothes each week,
while H&M and Forever21 get clothes daily. These brands are notorious for
knocking off high-end designers, allowing the customer to get something at
least superficially similar to the original at a small fraction of the cost, and
they’re priced lower than the rest of the market, making their products feel
like a bargain.

The low costs mean people can buy things they don’t need without much
thought. If a $30 dress or shirt drops to $20 or $15 on sale, it’s practically
irresistible. That hedonic pleasure center in your brain lights up, with the
price causing little competing pain.

Shoppers love a bargain, and fast-fashion collaborations with designers draw

big crowds looking for high design at low prices. (Reuters/Christian
Charisius)

The only way to turn a profit selling clothing that cheap is to sell a lot of it.
That’s exactly what fast fashion has been doing, and making huge profits in
the process. The Zara cofounder Amancio Ortega is recognized by Forbes as
the “world’s richest retailer.” Sweden’s wealthiest person is Stefan Persson,
chairman of H&M. Both their companies continue to grow.

A DV E RT I S E M E N T

Mid-market and luxury brands play off consumers’ desire for a bargain as

well, with many seeming to be perpetually holding sales. To facilitate the
frequent markdowns they offer, several now inflate their initial retail prices.
They’re able to protect their margins and let customers believe they’re getting a
deal, enticing them to buy more.

Overall, clothes have been getting cheaper for decades, ever since apparel
manufacturing started moving to developing countries, where production
costs are significantly lower. In the U.S., the world’s largest apparel market,
97.5 percent of clothing purchased is now imported, according to the
American Apparel & Footwear Association. That percentage has risen steadily
for years. As recently as 1991, it was just 43.8 percent.

The spread of fast-fashion chains has helped spur the process. Zara, which
pioneered the fast-fashion model, opened its first U.S. store in 1989, the same
year that the U.S. chain Forever 21 opened its first location in a mall.

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index, which
measures the change in U.S. retail prices, shows that while retail prices of
goods overall have gone up, clothing prices have generally decreased.

Apparel Has Gotten Cheaper Though Overall Prices Have

Increased

Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics

This means Americans are able to buy more clothing, and as incomes have
increased overall, they spend less of their money on it.

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Indeed, clothing accounted for 14 percent of Americans’ total discretionary

expenditures in 1901, had decreased to 10.4 percent by 1960, and then
plummeted to just 3.1 percent in 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics.

Spending on Clothes as a Share of Total Spending

Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics

These conditions make it easy for people to buy things they don’t need or even
really want. One email survey of American women found that those who
responded owned an average of $550 of unworn clothes; and the Council for
Textile Recycling estimates that Americans throw away 70 pounds of clothes
and other textiles each year.

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In 1991, Americans purchased an average of 40 garments per person,

according to the American Apparel & Footwear Association. In 2013, it was
up to 63.7 garments, down from a peak of 69 just before the recession. That
means that, on average, Americans buy more than one item of clothing each
week.

The consumption isn’t by any means limited to the U.S. Women in Britain,
for instance, now own four times as much clothing as they did in 1980. This
glut of clothing is having effects beyond stuffing our closets. About 10.5
million tons of clothes end up in American landfills each year, and
secondhand stores receive so much excess clothing that they only resell about
20 percent of it. The remainder is sent to textile recyclers, where it’s either
turned into rags or fibers, or, if the quality is high enough, it’s exported and
cycled through a cutthroat global used-clothing business.

Determining exactly how much time people spend shopping for clothing isn’t
simple. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts an American time use
survey, but clothes shopping is lumped in with shopping for everything else
except groceries and gas. It is clear, however, that more and more Americans
are shopping online, and early evidence suggests that they are shopping more
often. Andrew Lipsman, vice president of marketing and insights at the
Internet research firm ComScore, says that mobile shopping in particular has
“exploded.”

Mobile, in fact, is now the primary way people buy online, and one
ComScore study on mobile shopping in five key European countries found
that purchases of clothing and accessories led all other categories. A
forthcoming report from the firm about the way people shop on mobile
found that in January 2015, Americans spent about three hours over the
course of the month shopping on phones and tablets. That was up around 3
percent compared to the same period the year before, and it doesn’t include
the amount of time they spent shopping on computers or in physical stores.

A DV E RT I S E M E N T

Lipsman points out that this mobile browsing didn’t necessarily lead to
purchases. Browsing is also about research and entertainment. “It is more than
just transactional,” he says.

It isn’t restricted to e-commerce sites either. “One of the platforms that I think
is really interesting right now is Pinterest, in part because people browse it for
entertainment when a lot of the content is retail content,” he says. Pinterest’s
own growth has been massive. In the last six months of 2014 alone its active
users grew by 111 percent.

The obsession with looking at products, even if no purchase is intended, is

especially prevalent among Millennials, the generation that grew up in the age
of the Internet. A report by the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit focused on
responsible land use, concluded that 45 percent of Millennials (called
Generation Y in the report) spend more than an hour each day looking at
retail sites.

“Half the men and 70 percent of the women consider shopping a form of
entertainment,” the report explained. “They are researching products,
comparing prices, envisioning how clothing or accessories would look on
them, or responding to flash sales or coupon offers.”

A series of separate reports on millennials reached similar conclusions: They

love to shop, even if they’re not buying—although plenty are buying, too.
YouTube haul videos, which feature mostly teen girls posting their scores from
shopping trips, have become so popular that the bigger names, such as
Bethany Mota, are now bona-fide social media stars.

Watch later Share

Watch on

Studies of how the Internet plays into compulsive buying are in their early
stages, but the evidence so far suggests there may be a link. One small study
published in 2009 noted a “linear relationship” between online shopping and
compulsive buying. Another 2014 survey of shoppers in the UK concluded
that the “new shopping experience” offered by e-commerce “may lead to
problematic online shopping behaviour.”

"Shopping is a way that we search for our selves

and our place in the world."

One of the few relevant longitudinal studies on compulsive shopping,

published in 2005, looked at the way East Germans integrated into Western
society after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The study found that, as East Germans
settled into Western consumer culture, they showed a “marked increase” in
compulsive buying. The authors concluded that postmodern consumer
societies “create an atmosphere which supports the rise of compensatory and
compulsive buying.”

A DV E RT I S E M E N T

April Lane Benson, a psychologist and the author of To Buy or Not To Buy:
Why We Overshop and How To Stop, specializes in treating compulsive
shopping. When she describes the reasons for people constantly browsing as
entertainment, she makes it sound like an existential crisis.

“I think that it has something to do with the pace that we live our lives at and
the paucity of time that so many of us spend in pursuits that really feed our
souls,” she says. “Shopping is a way that we search for our selves and our place
in the world. A lot of people conflate the search for self with the search for
stuff.” Shopping therefore becomes a “quick fix,” as she puts it, for other
problems.

There has been a backlash against what some perceive as mindless

overconsumption. In the past few years a “slow fashion” movement has
emerged which emphasizes buying less clothing and sticking to garments
made using sustainable, ethical practices. The recent book by Japanese
organizational guru Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, has
led to what’s been described as a“cult” of decluttering, with her acolytes
boasting of shedding piles of clothing.

Donated 30 giant bags of clothes & feel MUCH better! RT A

Therapeutic Approach to Closet Cleaning That Actually Works
http://t.co/0O3GliLT8P

— Hillary Kerr (@hillarykerr) March 13, 2015

A DV E RT I S E M E N T

The Internet is also full of articles and blog posts by parents trying to raise
kids with non-materialistic values, as well as blogs by recovering shopaholics.

So let’s take a breath here. Residents of industrialized societies are not all
doomed to endless “compensatory” shopping just because our brains seem to
enjoy it and our cultures are set up for it. The five-minute break from work
you take to look at clothes doesn’t necessarily mean you’re searching for your
identity in a pair of pants, or that you’re trying to fill a void.

The evidence does suggest, however, that shopping has taken on a new role in
our society and in our lives. It’s no longer just a transaction, a way to procure
necessities or luxuries, but rather has become an end in itself. It’s a leisure
activity, much like watching TV. It’s consumerism as entertainment.

Marc Bain is a fashion reporter at Quartz.

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