Yes, sustainable marketing is annoying

Maybe people don’t like being treated like idiots

In 1986, Princeton professor of philosophy Harry G. Frankfurt wrote On Bullshit, an essay about bullshitting — what it is, and why people do it (it was later published as a book in 2005). Frankfurt wrote that both honest people and liars care about the truth — an honest person understands that the truth has value, and a liar hides the truth because they know it’s important too. But a bullshitter does not care about the truth at all — they only say things that benefit them. If that’s the truth, then they’ll tell the truth — even a broken clock is right twice a day — but if it’s not, then that’s fine too.

“When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true, and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false” wrote Frankfurt. “For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false…He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” 

Bullshit is an inescapable part of the capitalist sickness we’re living through. Politicians, billionaires and CEOs bend the truth so much that we just assume it’s an inevitable part of the universe, like paying taxes and getting old.

What does this have to do with fashion? Because last month Business of Fashion published a report on why many consumers find sustainable marketing annoying. The report pointed to a recent Patagonia documentary talking about how shitty fast fashion is, as well as campaigns from Vestiaire Collective (the luxury resale platform) and Asket (a Swedish direct-to-consumer brand that makes high quality basics). “These campaigns can come off as sanctimonious” wrote BoF, “and opens all but the greenest brands to charges of hypocrisy.”