Why Young Shoppers Still Hesitate to Buy Upcycled Fashion

The global fashion industry is under mounting environmental pressure, and circular-economy models such as upcycling are increasingly promoted as a way out of the take-make-dispose cycle. Upcycling takes post-consumption surplus materials and creatively transforms them into products of higher value, turning potential waste into desirable apparel. Yet a puzzling disconnect persists: awareness of the ecological damage caused by fast fashion keeps rising, but this awareness has not translated into a corresponding fall in demand for cheap, disposable clothing.

That disconnect is sharpest among the very consumers who might be expected to lead the change. Today's younger cohorts are digital natives with high levels of social self-expression and strong environmental awareness, but they remain difficult to engage with upcycled apparel. Adoption and purchase intentions for upcycled fashion stay limited even as sustainability messaging saturates their social feeds, a contradiction that motivated a new study from researchers at the Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhi, and Fore School of Management, New Delhi.

The research, published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainability in the Circular Economy section, set out to fill critical gaps in understanding what drives purchase intention for upcycled fashion among young, urban, tech-savvy consumers. Rather than treating green-minded shoppers as a single bloc, the authors built their analysis on the Theory of Consumption Value, examining five distinct customer values: functional, social, emotional, conditional and epistemic. To test how these values translate into intent, the team collected structured survey responses from 477 participants and analyzed the data using Structural Equation Modelling, a statistical technique that allows researchers to estimate relationships between multiple latent constructs simultaneously.

This approach made it possible to assess how each of the five consumption values contributes to a shopper's stated intention to purchase upcycled fashion, rather than examining each driver in isolation. The study also introduced a second layer of analysis: the moderating influence of narrative competence. To test this, they used Process Macro, a widely applied computational tool for probing moderation effects in survey-based models.

By combining the consumption-value framework with narrative competence in a single structure, the authors propose what they call a unified Consumer Value-Narrative competence model for studying purchase intention in the upcycled fashion context. The authors report that the outcomes offer valuable insights for retailers seeking to enhance customers' purchase intention and contribute substantially to the existing literature on upcycled fashion. As with any survey-based intention study, the findings reflect stated intentions among the sampled population rather than observed purchases, and the model's generalizability beyond young, urban, tech-savvy consumers remains an open question.

Still, the work marks a step toward explaining one of sustainable fashion's most stubborn puzzles: why a generation fluent in environmental values has been so slow to embrace clothes made from what others throw away.

Subject of Research: Consumer purchase intention for upcycled fashion among young urban consumers

Article Title: Breaching take-make-dispose cycle: “Beauty in the Flawed”- a study of customers' intent to purchase upcycled fashion

Article References: Mehta, A., Arora, H., Kumar, S., & Singla, S. (2026). Breaching take-make-dispose cycle: “Beauty in the Flawed”- a study of customers' intent to purchase upcycled fashion. Frontiers in Sustainability, 7, 1963614. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2026.1963614

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsus.2026.1963614

Keywords: upcycled fashion, circular economy, purchase intention, Theory of Consumption Value, narrative competence, sustainability, fast fashion, structural equation modelling, consumer behavior, textile waste, Breaching, take-make-dispose