Vestiaire Collective works to educate influencers on fast-fashion harms

If you can’t beat ’em, teach ’em. That seems to be Vestiaire Collective’s new motto.

The secondhand luxury retailer, which a year ago banned the sale of items from brands it classifies as fast fashion, including Shein and H&M, on its platform, is now bringing its anti-fast-fashion ethos to its influencer marketing strategy.

Beginning in November, Vestiaire Collective kicked off a six-month program with five influencers across the US, France, Italy, the UK, and Germany to educate them about the harms of fast fashion and encourage them to share their learnings with audiences online, Dounia Wone, the brand’s chief impact officer, told us.

Some of the influencers Vestiaire Collective is working with, which include Amy Jackson, Audrey Afonso, and Yewande Biala, have previously worked with, or continue to work with or wear brands that Vestiaire Collective has banned, like Asos, Zara, and Mango. Wone told us that was intentional.

“We wanted influencers that would talk to their community and for their community to not be that educated on secondhand and the damage of fast fashion,” she said.

But how effective can a message be if the messengers are wearing or promoting the very thing the brand says it’s against? Wone said the hope is to “change the way [influencers] do influencing” by encouraging them to adopt a “buy less, but buy better” mentality over time.

“Let’s see in six months…if we change just one influencer among the five of them in our batch, we will reiterate and try with five others, and try and try and try until we see a shift,” she said.

Reduce, reuse, repost

This time last year, Vestiaire Collective used CGI to virtually drown Times Square in piles of clothing, asking viewers what they would do “if fast-fashion waste was on your doorstep” in what Wone said was its biggest campaign ever. The work with influencers this year is similarly designed to make a splash and get people thinking about the impact of their purchases in a way that Wone said she hopes will get more attention.

“If you asked me 30 years ago, I would have brought a journalist for them to pick up on the stories…but it’s not the way it is today,” she said. “[Influencers] are the ones ruling the trends and word of mouth.”

Over the course of the program, the influencers working with Vestiaire Collective will attend masterclasses and have discussions with experts in sustainability and communication, as well as with influencers who have shifted away from working with fast-fashion brands. Near the end of the program, they will also take an extended trip to a clothing landfill, which Wone said will allow them to “experience the full supply chain” of fast fashion.

While the influencers are contracted to make at least three posts during the six-month program, Wone said this program is about more than the content. The hope, she said, is that conversations with experts in the field will change the participating influencers’ views on creating content that promotes fast fashion.

“We don’t want to push them to advertise the program,” Wone said. “We want them to land somewhere where they will be the change, so our focus is really to have an impact on the long term for them.”

Given that some of the influencers’ audiences have come to expect fast-fashion promotions, Wone said her team anticipates some degree of pushback in the comments, including the argument that fast fashion is, for some shoppers, a more affordable option.

“To that, I would answer with a simple sentence from my father,” Wone said. “I’m too poor to buy shitty stuff.”

She’s hopeful the program will lead to more change than a single campaign.

“We are treating [the influencers like] we’re treating our partnerships with brands,” she said, adding that it can be a shock to change a business model or cut off a source of income all at once. The same could be said for changing people’s shopping habits, she said.

“It takes a long time to change consumer behavior at large, but it’s also our mission,” Wone said. “We all know that what we are going through today in the fashion industry is not sustainable forever.”