Slow Fashion As A Strategy For The Tech Industry

Look at a well-made garment in your closet. Touch and feel the sweater or the shirt. Lift it and feel the weight of it, inhale the smell of natural fibers, the way it ages into you rather than away from you. And then, tomorrow, I invite you to visit a fast-fashion store, where a shirt costs $5. This disposable shirt pills after three washes, destined for a landfill, before you, as the owner, has memorized its shape.

The slow fashion movement is a signpost for a broader cultural shift—one that challenges the model of planned obsolescence and calls into question the sustainability of the consumer economy, not just for clothes but for technology.

Something has shifted in the closets of the thoughtful. The “forever garment”—a coat you will hand down, a pair of boots you will resole—has become a quiet act of rebellion. The phrase “buy less, buy better” now carries the moral weight that “buy more, pay less” once did.

This shift in consumption goes beyond fashion. The same mindset—a preference for lasting, well-made items—is now influencing how we view and use our devices, from laptops to smartphones.

What is happening in slow fashion is an early example of how we will soon relate to our technology. Increasingly, we will approach our phones, laptops, and software with the care and intention once reserved for quality clothing.

The End of the Consumer Economy as We Have Known It

We have been trained, for half a century, to treat our devices as we treat fast fashion: use briefly, discard without guilt, upgrade compulsively. The smartphone in your pocket was designed with a two-year lifespan hardcoded into its battery, its software updates, and its cultural relevance. This is not a bug this is an important detail of tech companies' business model.

But the same forces that killed fast fashion are coming for this model. The Right-to-Repair legislation, combined with Environmental guilt and Economic precarity, will foster this new attitude towards the tech gadgets we once adored. A younger generation has learned to see through the seduction of the “new.” The question is not whether technology will undergo the same transformation as fashion, but what we will become when it does.

The Promise of Forever Tech

The slow fashion movement revealed something uncomfortable: we had been paying for disposability rather than quality. The $5 shirt was not cheap; it was expensive in ways we refused to count—in landfill space, in the labor of unseen hands, in the soul-cost of owning nothing worth keeping.

This reckoning also applies to technology. True value in devices will be defined not by initial price or rapid turnover, but by longevity and the absence of engineered obsolescence. The device you keep, repair, and upgrade is more valuable than the one replaced every few years.

From churn to stewardship: Hardware will be designed for repair, modularity, and long-term service relationships. The manufacturer ceases to be a vendor and becomes a custodian.

From ownership to relationship: Software will stop bricking perfectly good hardware. Interoperability and backward compatibility will become marks of quality, not obstacles to profit.

From novelty to narrative: Marketing will shift from “new this year” to “built to last.” Durability scores and repairability indices will join thread count and fabric composition as markers of worth.

Slow Culture does not mean it is anti-technology. With a slower way of life, we prioritize intentionality over optimization, aligned with our values. We accept that this can be inefficient, because our colleague with the most expensive and latest smartphone or smart glasses gets the daily news a moment earlier. But why should there be more pressure in the system, with constantly new versions of phones or computers?

The Hunger for the New

But here is the uncomfortable truth that the slow-fashion evangelists rarely acknowledge: novelty is not merely a capitalist invention. It is a human need. We are wired to seek the new, to grow bored with the familiar, to signal our evolution through our possessions. The desire for the latest phone is not fundamentally different from the desire for a new coat in the spring—it is the ancient ache for renewal dressed in silicon.

And the technology industry knows this, with shorter lifecycles historically driving not just profit but also innovation. Planned obsolescence, for all its sins, funded the R&D that gave us the smartphone in your hand. If we stretch device lifespans from two years to ten, what happens to the pace of invention? To the jobs that depend on manufacturing volume?

There is also the class dimension. “Buy less, buy better” requires the capital to buy better in the first place. The person who can afford a $300 sweater that lasts a decade is not in the same position as the one who must buy a $30 sweater every year because that is what their budget allows. Forever tech risks becoming a luxury, like organic food or walkable neighborhoods. This is a virtue, available only to those who can afford it.

Novelty Without Disposal

So how do we reconcile society’s accelerating demand for technological innovation—driven by AI and changing compatibility requirements—with the emerging imperative to resist disposability? The question is how to transition from a culture of replacement to one of stewardship without sacrificing progress.

The resolution, I suspect, will not be the death of novelty but its transfiguration.

Slow fashion did not eliminate the desire for new clothes; it repackaged it. Style cycles now layer on a stable wardrobe. You will find hundreds of YouTube Videos about the perfect capsule collection, or the combination of old, new and seasonal accessories. The new is no longer a replacement; it is an addition, a variation on a theme you already own.

The technology we use every day will follow this development. We will keep our phones longer, but we will update their software, swap their modules, customize their cases, and augment their capabilities. The hardware becomes the stable wardrobe; the software becomes the seasonal accessory. Innovation continues—but it is innovation in depth, not width.

This is, in fact, a return to a much older relationship with objects. Our great-grandparents did not discard their furniture; they reupholstered it. They did not throw away their watches; they repaired them, passed them down, told stories about them. Ownership meant care, not consumption.

What Will You Keep?

The shift from fast to forever is not primarily an economic or environmental question. It is a question about ourselves. Look again at the garment in your closet or the phone on your desk. Both pose the same question in a fast paced world:

If you can't commit to an object, how can you commit to something at all?