Creativity and Sustainable Fashion Apparel Consumption

Because promoting sustainable fashion apparel consumption is a pressing contemporary problem, Generation Y participants in the Midwestern United States were challenged to a Fashion Detox, where they refrained from acquiring fashion apparel for ten weeks and blogged about the experience. Content analysis of blog entries for this exploratory study revealed expressions of creativity that were examined through the lens of the propulsion model of kinds of creative contributions. Findings revealed kinds of creative contributions stimulated by voluntary simplicity that satisfy the fashion apparel consumer’s need for novelty and change: expressions of creativity that follow a fashion-driven direction already established, called redefinition and forward incrementation, and those that take a completely different path but within the context of seeking novelty and change, or redirection. Examples of creative activities within these three kinds of creative contributions are, respectively, re-designing old clothes, shifting their focus to home décor instead of apparel, and turning away from fashion apparel altogether. Fourty-six percent of the participants left the 10-week activity feeling that their creativity had been enhanced and 54% expressed the intention to carry on the sustainable consumption lessons they learned. By cultivating expressions of creativity that lead to sustainable consumption through education and innovative business models, stakeholders may initiate a paradigm shift that fulfills the fashion apparel consumer’s need for novelty and change without sacrificing the planet s resources.

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