Teenagers can so often fall prey to frequent fashion ‘must-haves’. It is no wonder, as enticing new stock hits fast fashion stores twice weekly nowadays.
Retailers know just how to lure consumers into these absurd circles of micro trends. This incessant push for consumerism is a well-masterminded strategy to simply deliver profits for shareholders, but without revealing the exploitation and devastating effects this $3 trillion garment and textile industry has on our planet’s resources and on the people who produce the clothing.
By fueling customers’ endless desire for more, packaged in highly aspirant lifestyles and unrealistic ideals of beauty, fast fashion retailers just might have your teen drawn in hook, line and sinker!
With such aggressive tactics employed, it’s not surprising the peer pressure to dress in branded clothing and wear a season’s hottest looks is enormous among impressionable teens and young adults. So how can we help tame their taste for fast fashion, while bringing their awareness of choice toward more self-discernment?
Telling our teens to want less, or not allowing their peer shopping trips would be counter-productive. Rather these 7 tools can assist facilitate change, thereby giving them the freedom to find their personal fashion footing.
7 tips to taming teens’ taste for fast fashion
- Keep it clean: Once your teen has implemented the 7 steps to a clean teen closet, then they can be encouraged to take responsibility to maintain a well organised closet by keeping pieces; hung, neatly folded, clean, any repair jobs done.
- Take care in magazines choices: The majority of mainstream fashion titles are open invitations to feed your teen’s feelings of dissatisfaction, incompleteness and body-inferiority issues. A home free of fashion magazines can help liberate your teen!
- Build self and body confidence through movement: The need for constant clothes shopping can often be masking self-confidence issues around physical inferiority complexes. So activate self-body love through fitness training, dance or sports.
- Is shopping time really quality time?: Let’s rethink quality parent/teen time if retail therapy is your ‘together time’. Simply enjoying one another in a quieter, more relaxed and natural environment could be time better spent.
- Delay instant gratification: When your teen does find something they want to purchase, allow some cool-off time. Emotionally charged purchases often make for poor choices. Most stores will put an item aside for 24 hours.
- One in, one out policy: If your teen’s closet has the right basics, then a new purchase should replace an existing closet item. This not only makes the purchase a more conscious act, but also encourages a charitable ethos.
- Be the change you want to see: The double standards of “Do as I say, not as I do” always feels like betrayal. Are you ready to step up to the plate by being a fashion conscious role model?
“As a vegan personal stylist, and mother of teens, I certainly see the value of not only practicing more discernment and self-awareness around my own fashion choices, but also sharing this empowering self-realisation with my daughters,” says Lyn Cowie. Look out for the third article in this teen-fashion series in the coming month.
