How fashion paved the way for refurbished tech

It's no secret that fashion and technology are among the world’s most high-polluting industries. According to Earth.org, fast fashion is responsible for around 10% of global carbon emissions, which is more than international flights and maritime shipping combined. Meanwhile, non-profit Material Focus has dubbed electronic waste (e-waste) “the new fast fashion”, with 100,000 tonnes thrown away every year in the UK alone. 

The term “fast tech” has emerged to highlight the ways consumer technology mimics the fast fashion industry. Fast tech, too, relies on short consumer lifecycles, shifting trends, worker exploitation, and a culture that normalises replacing broken items instead of repairing them. But as consumers become increasingly eco-conscious, there is also a growing market for “slow tech”—a movement focused on cultivating a more mindful relationship with buying, and using, technology. 

Slow tech rejects overconsumption and the buy-waste-replace cycle in favour of repairing, reusing, and extending the lifespan of devices. But before Back Market started to take this concept of slow tech into the mainstream, there was also slow fashion. According to research by Custom Market Insights, the circular fashion industry is projected to reach $13.8 billion by 2033 (more than double the $6.4 billion it was valued at in 2024), and it’s fair to say this buoyant market has served as a direct trigger for circularity in tech.  But how did we get here? And what can the slow tech world learn from the successful model circular fashion has already pioneered?

How fashion made pre-loved cool 

To answer properly, well, you have to go back to the beginning. If you were a teenager in the early 2000s then it was deeply uncool to admit you were wearing a hand-me-down skirt or something purchased from a charity shop. But things have changed, and pre-loved clothing shopping has undergone a rapid image makeover. 

The silk dress I wore to my brother’s wedding? It was £6 from a charity shop. My favorite Pepperberry dress that I wear constantly, because it’s both comfortable and versatile? Well, 4 from Vinted. And you bet I’m saying so to anyone who compliments my outfits. “Thanks, it’s thrifted!” is no longer a whispered admission but rather, well, a proud declaration. Pre-loved fashion has therefore become not just acceptable, but also aspirational, making pre-loved feel genuinely cool.

Cathy Moscardini, Head of Sustainability at fashion reselling app Depop, explains that this shift started with the consumers. “Secondhand became culturally relevant: celebrities now wear it on red carpets, stylists source it for shoots, and it shows up in music and social media feeds,” she explains. 

Meanwhile, Alice Chave, co-founder of Incador–which makes bespoke jewellery from precious metals rescued from e-waste–explains that this shift in mindset has “helped people become comfortable with the idea that products can have multiple lives and still retain their aspiration and value.” 

Changing consumer psychology 

Through a combination of technology, consumer education, brand initiatives, and the “boutique-ifying” of physical pre-loved clothing retail, we have also seen a profound shift in buyer psychology. Newness is no longer a driving factor in our perception of value. Journalist Lauren Bravo, the author of How to Break Up With Fast Fashion, believes that slow tech can learn valuable lessons in positioning from slow fashion. 

She explains that to the average consumer, the climate crisis feels distant compared to the immediate pressures of daily life. “That’s why I often focus on the way that fashion overconsumption can leave us stressed, broke, and with no sense of our own personal style, while slow fashion can make us calmer, more stylish, more creative, and more confident in our own skin. You have to preach the personal positives as well as the doom,” Bravo explains. 

“Pre-loved retail is culturally relevant: celebrities now wear it on red carpets, stylists source it for shoots, and it shows up in music and social media feeds" - Cathy Moscardini, Head of Sustainability at Depop

Depop’s Moscardini agrees. “People come to Depop because they want fashion that feels personal and accessible, and that aligns with their personal values. They want unique pieces, fair prices, and a more sustainable way to shop,” she says. “Slow tech needs to draw from the same playbook.” 

The buyer protections, return options, and feedback systems on circular fashion platforms like Depop and Vinted have helped demonstrate that consumers are ready to embrace more circular consumption habits. Refurbished tech retailers like Back Market are now driving the same shift in electronics, an industry with far greater environmental stakes, making professionally restored devices as trusted and desirable as buying new, while dramatically reducing e-waste in the process.

Repair as rebellion

“In today's consumer landscape, which is so defined by our constant need for newness, repair can be a small act of rebellion,” says Bravo. She adds that extending the lifespan of an item of clothing by just nine months can reduce its overall carbon, waste, and water footprint by 20-30%. 

In tech, the Right to Repair movement contends that consumers should be able to repair items they own legally, practically, and affordably. Therefore, in a world that wants us to keep buying, repairing the things we already own and love is a simple yet powerful act of everyday resistance. This movement is still in its infancy in many countries. Some countries have enacted legislation–in France, for example, a repairability score from 0-10 must be displayed for several types of electronics at the point of sale–but others, including the UK, have yet to follow suit. 

Many well-known clothing brands – including Patagonia, TOAST, and Berghaus – offer free repair services to keep their garments in circulation for longer. Others offer schemes such as Levi’s Wear Longer Project, focused on teaching people to repair and refresh their own garments. But much of the progress in this area has been pioneered by small and independent brands. 

I spoke to Bronwyn Lowenthal, a fashion designer and founder of sustainable womenswear brand Lowie. Founded in 2002, Lowie has offered free repairs since “before sustainability was fashionable” and also runs a recycling scheme called Re:Love Lowie. “I felt that, if someone was going to spend money on something they loved, [offering free repairs] was the right thing to do,” Lowenthal says, hoping slow tech brands can follow a similar model. 

Julian Lloyd Jones, a Back Market customer and founder of London-based tailored clothing brand Casual Fitters, has also offered free repairs since launching the business in 2018. Casual Fitters is currently the only tailor in London offering this service as standard. “We believe in making a high-quality product and then having an extended relationship with clients,” Lloyd Jones says. “I hate chucking things out. I want things to last, and often they can last with a little bit of care.” 

Fashion as a cultural test case 

But the push for circularity has exciting implications extending far beyond the fashion industry. “Where fashion leads, other sectors follow,” Tom Crisp, the course leader for Falmouth University's Sustainable Fashion MA degree, explains. “As fashion lends a cultural cool to societal behaviours, it has inherently paved the way for circularity to be much more socially acceptable and be embraced by not just the tech industry, but all industries.”

Sustainable fashion startups have proven there is a consumer desire for goods built to last and designed for repairability, while the success of preloved fashion resale platforms helped to secure mainstream acceptance of secondhand shopping. Lloyd Jones believes that this is part of a wider cultural trend towards greater awareness of sustainability, citing the ability to reach people via the internet as a key factor in making repairs and resale more accessible.  “Products have always been recyclable and had second, third, fourth, fifth uses,” he says, “people are more readily able to recycle things, because we’re able to resell them online, repurpose them, and reach a broader market.” 

Despite the promising future of slow tech, there are also many others challenges to overcome. “Garments don’t require technical updates or systems to remain usable,” Moscardini explains. The same is not always true of tech, perhaps explaining the rise of refurbished vs secondhand consumer-to-consumer tech sales. Crisp suggests that tech should “use modularity, replaceable batteries, and standardised parts to make [devices] easier to repair and easier to recycle.” 

Planned obsolescence, which Crisp calls “a business decision, not an engineering inevitability”, is another major barrier to greater sustainability in the consumer tech space. Moscardini agrees that the biggest changes need to happen at the design stage. “Products should be built for longevity, whether that’s more durable materials in fashion or longer-term software support and repair capabilities in tech,” she says.

What’s next? 

Now that slow fashion has paved the way for tech and other industries to follow, what other responses and solutions will we see? And what will be key to solving the ongoing problems of waste and overconsumption in these highly polluting industries? I put this question to some of our experts. 

“It’s hard to predict,” says Casual Fitters founder Lloyd Jones, citing competition between the ongoing disposable economy and the brands (and consumers) trying to do things differently. He believes that legislation alone rarely works and that change needs to be led by companies. 

“In today's consumer landscape, which is so defined by our constant need for newness, repair can be a small act of rebellion" - Lauren Bravo, the author of How to Break Up With Fast Fashion

Bravo and Lowenthal both addressed the potential for more to happen on our high streets as well as online. “I really hope we'll see more community repair cafes and repair shops popping up on our high streets. Apps like Sojo and The Seam have done amazing work normalising repair and alteration for our clothes. I'd love to see the same thing happen with tech and appliances,” Bravo says. Lowenthal adds that: “I think there’s space for a high street repair place. [Repairing] needs to be seen as cool, but also convenient.”

“The electronic waste crisis simply needs to be talked about a lot more,” says Chave. “Electronic waste is currently the fastest-growing waste stream in the world, yet it is still under the radar compared with other environmental issues. Millions of tonnes of electronics are discarded every year, even though they contain extremely valuable materials.” Incador aims to play a role in this conversation by showing that recycled materials do not lose their value and can still be used to create beautiful, refined, and lasting pieces. 

Though unethical brands still have a hold over the fashion industry, and the sustainable tech market has a long way to go, exciting things are happening in both spaces. Though the fashion and tech industries are tremendously different, they also share many of the same challenges around waste, use of finite resources, and the human and environmental cost of overconsumption. Perhaps, through aligning their priorities and learning from each other’s best practices, these two sectors can bring about positive change together.