Lisa S. McNeill

This study aimed to contribute to the empirical literature on ethical fashion labelling. It investigates if complex, ethical, point-of-sale labels that ‘rate’ products’ ethical status on an ordinal scale influence consumer evaluations of fast-fashion garments (a) in any significant way at all and (b) in a way that is consistent with their reported ethical scores. In an experiment, 400 consumers evaluated a set of four fast-fashion garments with two levels of the Tearfund ordinal ethical label, a generic binary ethical label and garments with no label. Purchase intention was the dependent variable. The presence of a Tearfund label promoted significantly higher fast-fashion garment purchase intention, whatever ethical status the label was indicating. Thus, the rating label did significantly influence fast-fashion garment purchase intention, but not in any useful way. This is a novel and significant finding that indicates that fashion ethical labels are evaluated by using similar subconscious heuristic decision processes to those found in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) markets. Ethical labels that rely on cognitive processing by the consumer may therefore be ineffective, and simpler iconic brand-like label systems that can support subconscious processing may be more useful in a fast-fashion setting.