The Neurological Pleasures of Fast Fashion

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.

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.

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.

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.

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It's what’s called "transactional utility" says Tom Meyvis, a professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and an expert in consumer psychology. "You see this a lot with clothing," he says. "Part of the joy you 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."

If seeing items you want and getting a bargain both elicit waves of shopping joy, you couldn’t engineer a more pleasurable consumer culture than the modern, globalized West.

Fast fashion perfectly feeds this neurological process. 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.

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.

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.

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