Sustainable fashion activism found its stride on social media. From #WhoMadeMyClothes to the deinfluencing trend, the movement organised, campaigned and grew its audience on platforms that seemed to reward it. But as those platforms now appear to pivot away, creators and brands are watching their reach collapse. Maggie Zhou reports on what a very-online movement loses when the algorithms move on.
Small brands report ‘algorithmic abandonment’
A few months ago, 16-year-old Ghanaian slow fashion brand Osei-Duro announced its closure. While devastating, news like this is becoming more commonplace. Changing tariffs, ultra-fast fashion competitors, rising costs and tightening consumer budgets are making it difficult for sustainable and ethical labels to keep afloat. But in the brand’s farewell Instagram post, Osei-Duro specifically called out “algorithm abandonment” as one of the main factors leading to its shutdown.
The social media landscape we know today is worlds away from what it was even just five years ago. Content is faster and shorter and seemingly inescapable.
I can’t count how many dystopian-esque live-streamed videos I’ve seen where women strut on treadmills, piles of clothes at their feet. They swap into new outfits every dozen seconds, coaxing viewers to purchase straight from their phone. This whirlwind frenzy of content creation and consumption mirrors the current fashion system we’re swept up in; unrelenting and mindless.
For more than a decade, the sustainable fashion movement has organised, campaigned and grown its audience through social media. But what if the very platforms that amplified the message were never truly built to support it? As algorithms increasingly reward speed, volume and shoppability, sustainability advocates are confronting an uncomfortable truth: the tools they relied on to challenge overconsumption are, by design, engines of it.
The creators who stopped talking about sustainability
Between 2018 and 2022, New Zealand digital creator Danni Duncan dedicated her social media presence to advocating for sustainable fashion. But a few years in, she recognised her audience was growing “fatigued” by the conversation. “I definitely noticed that engagement on that content slowed down considerably,” she says. “It’s not a glamorous thing to talk about […] people see it as not being accessible.”
Though Duncan still follows her slow fashion habits, she’s largely stopped sharing about sustainable fashion online anymore. Since she’s pivoted her content away, she’s seen significant growth in engagement and followers.
#Sustainability has 830,900 posts on TikTok. On Instagram (six years older than TikTok) #sustainability boasts 21.7 million posts. Despite the high count, it’s not sustainability activists and thought leaders leading this conversation. Big brands are the ones sucking the oxygen out of the room, researchers conclude.
Dr Katia Dayan Vladimirova is an academic researcher with a double PhD in political theory (climate ethics) and political science (climate politics) whose work focuses on fashion consumption and sustainability. Her 2023 co-authored literature review attempts to measure the efficacy of social media in regard to sustainable fashion consumption.
The loudest voices speaking about sustainable fashion were actually H&M and Reliance
Dr Katia Dayan Vladimirova – academic researcher
She methodologically analysed Instagram posts that mentioned the term ‘sustainable fashion’ in their description, collecting the 50,000 most-liked posts (that equated to over 11 million likes). “One of the elements of this analysis was to understand who was talking about it. The findings were telling: The loudest voices speaking about sustainable fashion were actually H&M and Reliance.”
You read that correctly. The accounts garnering the most engagement on content about sustainable fashion were Swedish fast fashion conglomerate H&M (which made $24.7 billion USD in net sales in 2024) and Reliance, India’s largest producer of polyester.
Vladimirova explains that most of these posts came through influencers who were paid to advertise these brands. “Even though it was said through the accounts of influencers, it’s a brand that was behind this communication […] It’s a way to manipulate public opinion,” she says.
Movements built on social media tend to stay there
A lot of grassroots sustainable fashion activism grew from social media. Back in 2013, after the Rana Plaza disaster, Fashion Revolution was founded. “The impact of social media, in terms of activism over the past 10 years, has been huge,” co-founder Orsola de Castro says, going as far as to say that the global fashion movement is “entirely based on online activism”.
She points to the #WhoMadeMyClothes campaign that reached billions of people online. “That did not just generate awareness […] it encouraged other organisations to lobby for legislation [and had] a proper impact when it [came] to the supply chain in particular,” Castro says.
“Undoubtedly, a lot was achieved with social media activism […] Is the scenario completely different these days? Yes, it is,” she says.
Clare Press, sustainability communicator, author and host of The Wardrobe Crisis podcast, agrees. “Sustainable fashion activism has been extremely successful on social media. Social media underpinned IRL events, things like Stitch ‘n Bitch get-togethers and clothes swaps, but it also massively amplified policy campaigns,” she says.
“Today, I don’t think those big campaigns would take off in the same way. To borrow from Cory Doctorow, it’s the enshitification of everything—and social media takes the top slot.”
A decade ago, social media really did feel like it could help rewire how industries and society at large operated. #MeToo forced boardroom reckonings. Black Lives Matter mobilised millions onto streets across the United States and around the world. If you were posting about labour justice for garment workers or the climate costs of fast fashion even a half-decade ago, you probably had a few reasons to believe the platforms were on your side.
Social media has always been better at generating awareness than building the kind of organised, sustained pressure that actually changes industries
But were they? In her 2024 book Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix, researcher Katherine Cross argues that social media has always been better at generating awareness than building the kind of organised, sustained pressure that actually changes industries. The hashtag campaigns felt collective, with millions of people sharing the same message at the same time, but the platforms were designed to reward individual engagement, not collective action. In Cross’s telling, the movements that relied on social media often succeeded at creating content, a lot of content, and the content primarily benefitted the platforms.
What looked like a revolution was, in many cases, “a ‘public square’ where real people can get hurt, but nothing ever really changes,” Cross wrote.
If that sounds uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s watched sustainable fashion’s social media presence grow while the industry’s environmental record has barely shifted, it should.
A system built to sell
When did this all change? The honest answer is that there wasn’t a single flip-switch moment. It was an amalgamation of societal, financial, political, and cultural factors that brought us here, and the algorithmic shift is only the most visible symptom.
Global governments have seen a shift towards conservatism; far-right commentators are becoming more mainstream; and social media platforms are turning into shopping-first channels. Twitter is no longer Twitter; Canada’s been in a two-plus-years’ Meta news ban; TikTok was blocked in the US for all of 12 hours in January 2025; and Australia has enforced a social media ban for under 16s. It’s safe to say that today’s social media isn’t the same sandpit we used to play in.
Fingers (that itch for something to point at) direct blame at elusive algorithms and shadow-banning techniques. “I think that all messaging that questions the status quo has been restricted,” Castro says. “I think the glory of early social media was that [Big Tech] hadn’t quite cottoned on to how powerful it could be as an instrument for dissent […] Despite the fact that there is so much talk about free speech, social media is absolutely doing the opposite. It is impeding free speech.”
There have been a handful of sustainability-aligned social media trends that have cropped up, which Vladimirova says are “fun, but considered to be marginal”. Take 2023’s “deinfluencing” trend: the hashtag had 98,300 and 30,500 posts respectively on TikTok and Instagram, which saw users post videos encouraging people not to purchase certain items. (As a side note, pay attention to how tech companies refer to their customers as “users”, a term typically used when talking about substance-use and addiction.)
In 2024, the “underconsumption” trend (the hashtag had 48,500 and 20,600 posts respectively on TikTok and Instagram) rallied against the normalisation of overconsumption and instead showcased hauls of small quantities of well-loved items.
Then I looked at the might of fast fashion. On TikTok, #haul had 18.2 million posts, #unboxing had 16 million posts, #Shein had 8.6 million, #Zara had 3.5 million, #Temu had 2.1 million. By the time you’re reading this, the numbers will have risen.
If you’re not commercial, i.e. here to line Zuckerberg’s pockets, you’re devalued.
Clare Press – author and host of The Wardrobe Crisis podcast
If it hasn’t happened already, social media sites are becoming pure advertising mules. Meta admitted that last year they made billions—$16 billion USD, to be precise—from running ads for scams. Its morals (or lack thereof) are blatant.
The rise of TikTok Shop and Instagram Shopping proves that social media and eCommerce are merging into one. Shein and Temu’s gamification of their apps blur the line between shopping and entertainment. Shein’s production lines famously operate with lightning-fast, hyper-personalised algorithms that respond in real time to what’s trending online.
When social media’s raison d’être is to keep you scrolling and tapping forever, delivering individually curated, shoppable content is a way to keep eyeballs on screen. The churn-and-burn tactic of marketing is being transferred onto the way we consume content and clothes. It’s a never-ending, symbiotic cycle: ultra-fast fashion brands manufacture careless, cheap clothes, while social media manufactures demand.
Concepts of sustainable fashion, mindful consumption and ethical values don’t fit nicely inside this same-day-delivery box, do they? Simply put, slow fashion is antithetical to how social media thrives.
Social media doesn’t want you to wait 24 hours before clicking ‘buy’. Social media doesn’t want you to exit its app to research a brand’s credentials. Social media doesn’t want you to consider what you own before making a spontaneous purchase.
“My informed, educated guess would be that [algorithms] don’t support [sustainability] keywords at all. It’s definitely much lower on the priority list than anything that has to do with product recommendations or selling, especially if the companies that are selling are paying substantial amounts for promotion,” researcher Vladimirova says. “Nobody is paying for sustainability to be up on the agenda.”
Pushing a boulder uphill, online
Sticking up for sustainability in this age of social media can feel like the story of Sisyphus, pushing an unrelenting boulder up a hill, over and over again.
“We’re stuck in this game, this merry-go-round, each trying to be the brightest light in order to be heard,” Castro says. “I do find it both humiliating and completely ridiculous, but at the same time, there is the parallel thought, which is, ‘We need to stay there. We do need to keep agitating from within.’”
It recently reached a point when Castro felt compelled to share her feelings of being deprioritised by the algorithm on Instagram. Like many of her peers, it seemed that the tech overlords weren’t pushing out her content in the way they once did. “Checking with your community on social media on a regular basis is a start,” she says. “If you don’t see someone’s [content] for a while, go and find their feed and maybe apply a few likes as a gentle pressure [so the algorithm knows you] want to see this person more.”
There’s something telling about the fact that the advice for sustainability advocates might be to get their audience to manually game the algorithm with strategic likes. It’s a workaround, not a solution; and it reveals how much of the movement’s energy has been (mis)directed to maintaining visibility within a platform that was never designed to reward that challenge.
The uncomfortable truth is that social media’s most popular uses—the outfit-of-the-day posts, the haul videos, the unboxing content—are actually well matched to what platforms do best: surface-level, individual, entertaining content that keeps you scrolling. The trouble starts when we ask these same platforms to carry a message that fundamentally challenges their business model. Sustainable fashion isn’t just competing with fast fashion for algorithmic attention. It’s asking a commercial infrastructure to amplify a message about consuming less. At a certain point, the boulder isn’t rolling back down the hill. It was never going to stay at the top.
Sustainable fashion isn’t just competing with fast fashion for algorithmic attention. It’s asking a commercial infrastructure to amplify a message about consuming less.
Press, who has been on Instagram for 13 years, believes the tide has well and truly changed. “Fashion people are endlessly creative, and now we’re being called on to be creative about the method [and] channel, not just the content,” she says. “More and more, I’m looking for ways to go back to the village, take things offline, engage with smaller groups in more personal ways.”
Indeed, the most durable work in sustainable fashion has always happened away from the platforms — through organising that doesn’t need to perform itself for an audience of millions. The policy lobbying, the supply chain investigations, the community building that Fashion Revolution and others have done offline never depended on the algorithm. It just happened to get publicised through it.
But this is where the conversation gets harder. Osei-Duro wasn’t a hashtag campaign or an activist account. It was a business, a 16-year-old brand that needed to reach customers, sell garments, and stay solvent.
For sustainable fashion brands, visibility isn’t a vanity metric. When Osei-Duro named “algorithm abandonment” as a factor in its shutdown, the brand described a loss of livelihood. When platforms make serfs of everyone from individual content creators to independent brands, “opt out” isn’t so easy.
Activists and communicators can and should diversify their channels, take things offline, build community in smaller and more intentional ways. For instance, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York City shows how a community-first strategy can then be buoyed by social content for reach; a door-knocking, needs-based policy platform works in a political context and a similar omnichannel approach may, in fact, work for other justice-oriented movements.
But when social media becomes the mall, independent brands may not feel they have that same luxury to decentre the platforms. And until those platforms are built to reward something other than speed, volume and spend, algorithm abandonment will keep claiming the sustainable fashion businesses that can least afford it.
