Stacey Solomon, fast fashion and how to change the world

I have a guilty pleasure and she goes by the name of Stacey Solomon. Over the past year, amid the throes of lockdown, I have been well and truly sucked into her joyful world on Instagram – taking intentional delight from her sharing of interiors design, self-deprecating comedy and meticulous content editing.

Stacey has 4.4 million followers. She’s famous for being a contestant on The X Factor, an ITV Loose Women presenter, and as I have come to learn of late, an incredibly powerful Instagram influencer.

See, while I personally carve out time to indulge in Stacey’s Stories at the end of an evening, I’ve never once thought about buying something she posts. Part of that is because her style is not for me, but the other is down to having a personal and professional focus on sustainable behaviour.

Fighting the climate and ecological crisis by changing the fashion system is how I spend my days. Buying through a swipe up connecting to Amazon is not. And yet I had never really thought twice about continuing to consume Stacey’s content. Full in the knowledge of how calculated and commercial it ultimately is, I genuinely enjoy her.

Then last week, Stacey’s collection with ultra-fast fashion brand In The Style (ITS) launched. You may recall, this is the company featured in the contentious Breaking Fashion documentary on the BBC, which if anything showcased how awful and out of touch fast fashion is with the changes required for sustainability. Or perhaps more to the point, confirmed just how much they are fanning the dual fires of destruction and inequality.

Yet, here was Stacey, seemingly naive to any associated negativity of such a move and overcome by the nervous emotion of what she was due to launch. A childhood dream come true to have her own collection she had poured her heart and soul into (with a six-figure deal no less). A line she spoke time and again about intentionally being accessible to everyone - available in sizes 4-28 accordingly. And at an affordable price point. They ordered extra volumes to make sure none of her fans would end up disappointed.

100,000 people tried to access the app on launch day at 12pm simultaneously. 80% of the collection sold out immediately. Stacey cried, her fans posted insane volumes of content. ITS, which recently floated on AIM, a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange, laughed the whole way to the bank.

According to the company, turnover for the year to March 31 is expected to hit ￡44.5 million, more than double the same a year earlier. And that’s been during COVID-19.

So here’s what has dawned on me from the whole experience... In the fashion influencer space right now, there are three types - those who “know” about connections to human exploitation and the climate emergency and are trying to do something about it; those who likewise know but are not doing anything about it for any number of reasons; and those who quite simply don’t know at all. For the sake of this argument, we’ll bucket the latter two together. Both as deniers, or inactivists.

That’s a very obvious thing to say. But it’s an important point to note because we’re witnessing that transition happening from one side to the other - inactivist to activist - time and again of late, and lots of those involved aren’t doing a great job of it.

Laura Whitmore (1.4 million followers) recently jumps to mind. Her argument in becoming the Primark Cares ambassador is that she’s working inside the retailer to try and make a difference. As journalist Lucy Siegle rightly pointed out: “You cannot challenge one thing in the supply chain if you accept the brand framing. Someone on a marketing contract posing as someone who is in a position to challenge or understand the truth about this system is not just a stretch, it’s delusional.”

Laura would be incredibly more powerful in the journey towards change by working on the outside of such organisations. Indeed, a commercial (no doubt lucrative) marketing partnership does not an activist make – what it rather does is tell Laura’s followers that Primark is now considered sustainable thus fine to fill their boots on as usual.

Who is guiding influencers to help them navigate this complexity? Because it really is complex. There are many different arguments but most of them don’t stack up to making a difference when you’re ultimately still modelling items in your posts and encouraging people to buy from a business that is otherwise anything but sustainable.

(This story isn’t going to enter into the argument around sustainable fashion and democracy. My belief is very simply that fast fashion in its truest sense is propped up by the middle class.)

Stacey then presents the other type of influencer - the inactivist. Those who either don’t know about this, or are actively choosing to ignore it in their storytelling.

And so my question here becomes how do we change that? We can have all of the so-called sustainable influencers spouting eco virtues in the world, but I imagine the majority of those 100,000 people in the ITS app at lunchtime last week are not following such individuals. They’re following Stacey.

So how do we have that conversation with their influencers in a way that is constructive? That doesn’t antagonise or preach? This isn’t intended to pull Stacey down, or the wider influencer set she represents (as there are many, many of them). But with 4.4 million followers, she has a responsibility. So whose responsibility is it to tell her?

And as with Laura, whose responsibility is it to guide her along that journey? We need education for these powerful forces to the point that we encourage and compel them to adapt their work focus and their approach to it. These are women who present as though they have a conscience (credit goes to Stacey for the incredible job she does of supporting small businesses). They’re mothers. They’re certainly opinionated. One can well imagine they’d be interested in contributing.

But at the moment, in the main – no doubt due to the fat commercial deals also involved – this size of influencer is throwing their energy into peddling consumerism above all else; albeit increasingly packaged up with a more responsible or accessible bow. The result is ultimately only making the status quo seem more acceptable.

And that’s a big problem.

While shifting consumer behaviour isn’t the single route to solving the climate crisis, closing out big time fast fashion collaborations dealing in excess disposable inventory would be a significant step forward within the bigger systems picture. Even more so would be getting some of Stacey’s followers behind the charge for change.

Yet this presents us with a deeply human problem - we have to tell people they’re doing something wrong. And we have to do so without alienating them in the process. Really what we’re talking about here is a struggle that’s fundamental to the root of inaction on the climate crisis.

Figure out how to get Stacey Solomon on board as an advocate and an activist then, and we might just change the world.