Sllo Talks: We Need an Overhaul on Hauls
The rise of social media and influencer culture has created an attentiveness to how the world perceives us online; we are constantly documenting our lives for public consumption. What impact does this have in the fashion industry?
#FashionHaul has 129 million views on TikTok and 124K posts on Instagram.
Hauls have become increasingly popular on social media. If you have any social media account, you’ll be very familiar with these types of videos. The notion of a ‘fashion haul’ has graduated from the ever-so-popular #OutfitOfTheDay hashtag, that saw “young people, and young women in particular… feel an unspoken obligation not to repeat an #OutfitOfTheDay.” According to a 2017 poll, 41% of women ages 18 - 25 felt pressure to wear a different outfit every time they left the house.
Haul videos fiercely promote fast fashion ventures, in which garments rotate on impossibly quick trend cycles. This leads to more than 501 million kilograms of unwanted garments ending up in landfill each year - and that’s only in Australia.
Brands like BooHoo, Shein, Pretty Little Thing and thousands more have perpetuated the speed of these trend cycles, leveraging the power of social media to market their products. BooHoo actively targets the “Instagram Generation”, with their influencer marketing presence increasing 59% from 2019 to 2020. With 8.9 million unique customers over the 2020 financial year, what is the scale of products required?
Over the course of a week, Vice monitored the amount of garments (not including no-wearable items) uploaded to the “New in Today” page on BooHoo. They counted 772 garments uploaded, averaging to 116 individual garments a day. That’s more garments than the average person’s wardrobe getting posted. Every. Single. Day.
What’s more, BooHoo is facing a modern slavery probe, as well as multiple allegations of unethical labour in overseas factories. The Sunday Times alleged workers were being paid as little as £3.50 an hour, which is less than half the minimum wage.
There’s a simple conclusion that needs to be drawn — we need an overhaul on hauls.
When we like, share and subscribe to ‘haul’ influencers, we are investing our digital currency in to a world of overproduction, “driven by corporate greed and mountains of discarded clothing in landfills worldwide,” explains i-D Magazine reporter, Jake Hall. “When there exists a vicious cycle of overproduction… exacerbating climate change, the ethics of these videos can further be called into question.”
Fashion hauls and overconsumption are synonymous. Whilst we can’t place the blame on the consumer for the actions of big corporations, we do have to be wary of the actions that promote behaviour of overconsumption.