The power of Trading Up

What it means to buy and sell better clothes

We, as a society, need to buy less clothes. 

I won’t bore you with the numbers, but sustainability doesn’t mean anything if we buy too much stuff, and research on shopping habits points to a future where we’re buying even more clothes.

Clearly, that needs to change. But I don’t think bashing people over the head with scary numbers or shaming people for shopping at H&M is going to get us anywhere. The whole reason I talked so much about personal style and investment pieces in my book was that shopping better should also be an opportunity. Contemporary consumerism is depressing and hollow. Trends are dumb, impulse purchases are a waste of money, and wardrobe purges are a sign that your shopping habits aren’t working. So buy less, of course, but buy better as well. 

Our crisis of overconsumption is, paradoxically, also an opportunity for brands who make great clothes. In theory, if everyone quit the fast fashion binges and weekly sneaker drops, they’d have the money to invest in pieces that would last for years and years. Of course, I’m not saying that everyone can or should spend $300 on a pair of jeans, but the basic idea is that if you buy less stuff you can invest in better stuff. In marketing lingo, this is known as trading up.

But that isn’t easy in an age of weekly drops, Instagram ads and free returns — the contemporary consumerist machine is all about making us buy more, not less. It’s up to us as individuals to rethink the way we spend our money, but fashion businesses also have a part to play as well. 

How can brands and retailers help us to trade up? They can start by making and selling great products, of course, but that’s not enough — they also need to talk about them. This is something I touched on a few weeks ago in my story on returns — despite ecommerce and social media making storytelling easier than ever, so many online stores fail to communicate even the most basic things about their clothes. Some brands and retailers are great at it, but most of them aren’t.

Part of the reason is that fashion businesses prioritize marketing over education. It’s about the visual language (aspiration, cool, elegance) instead of the nitty gritty — the choice of fabric, the thinking behind the cut, how it will age, how the sizing works with different bodies. But those details are literally the entire reason to spend more money on your clothes — you want an amazing fabric, with a more considered cut, and for your purchase to age amazingly.

There’s also a tendency for the founders of independent businesses to stay quiet — they see so much hype in the mass-market parts of the industry, that staying low-key feels like the right thing to do. But if you’re making an amazing product, why shouldn’t you tell the world all about it?

“It’s about justifying the garments we're making” explained 3sixteen co-founder Andrew Chen over a Zoom call last week. Andrew’s brand started in raw denim — they celebrated their 20th anniversary a few weeks ago — but since branched out into a full collection of quality, highly considered menswear. 3sixteen only makes product that they feel they really need to, and that’s something that really comes across in the marketing — I mentioned these guys in my story on returns, because they put so much work into explaining exactly why they made a product the way they did.