Consumption

The environmental debate around fast fashion has long turned on a single question: cotton or polyester, which is greener. A comprehensive lifecycle assessment now suggests the question itself was misplaced. Tracing garments from raw material through disposal, the research finds transport mode and garment lifespan reshape emissions by margins that no fibre substitution can match.

Artificial intelligence is no longer just recommending what to buy. It is beginning to decide and purchase on a shopper's behalf. India's fashion sector, projected to reach $1.93 trillion by 2030, faces a structural question that goes beyond technology adoption: when a customer's AI agent goes shopping, will it choose your brand over a competitor's?

Overproduction and overconsumption are driving the global fashion system beyond ecological limits, with EU efficiency measures failing to deliver absolute environmental reductions. New research has identified four structural lock-ins sustaining excess production and consumption, and proposes a transformative sufficiency-based policy mix designed to address their root causes across the sector.

The Nordic Council has unanimously adopted a recommendation urging governments to combat greenwashing and improve consumer information in the fashion industry. Nordic consumers buy more clothing per capita than the global average, with less than one per cent of discarded garments recycled circularly. The Nordic Swan Ecolabel is identified as a credible certification tool with strong consumer trust across the region.

Flaws in large language model-based user simulators have been exposed by research from Google Research introducing ConvApparel, a dataset of more than 4,000 human-AI conversations in the apparel shopping domain. The work develops a three-pillar evaluation framework to measure and address the realism gap in AI testing, with data-driven simulators outperforming prompt-based approaches across key behavioural metrics.

Fashion retail is moving into a sharper phase of algorithmic pricing as AI shopping tools connect consumer preferences, inventory pressures and automated purchasing. Dynamic pricing, virtual try-ons and agentic commerce could make shopping easier, but may also deepen discount chasing, impulse buying and overconsumption in already high-volume markets shaped by markdowns.

Clothing purchases have started rising again in the United States after a prolonged downturn, though the recovery remains split between luxury fashion and discount apparel. New Bank of America Institute data shows resale platforms drawing more frequent transactions, lower purchase values and growing seller participation, with Gen Z holding the largest seller share in 2026.

The global sportswear market is entering a slower, more demanding phase. HSBC's decision to cut Nike from Buy to Hold, slashing its price target from US$90 to US$48, has focused investor attention on a sector where modest growth, rising tariff costs and intensifying competition are making inherited scale a less reliable advantage than it once was.

Consumer willingness to rent clothing is shaped less by ecological conviction than by confidence in what arrives at the door. A study conducted across two European markets, combining survey data from more than 4,000 respondents with qualitative focus group research, finds that odour, visible wear, and logistical friction rank consistently above environmental motivation as barriers to clothing rental adoption.

China’s textile and apparel industry emissions were driven largely by household consumption and exports between 2000 and 2018, according to new modelling research. The study found that integrating renewable energy adoption with expanded clothing recycling could curb long-term emissions growth across interconnected supply chains while supporting continued industrial development.