Why some Consumers Choose Circular and Others do not: The Social Practice of Shopping for Circular Garments

Existing research highlights a gap between consumers’ stated preferences for circular products and their actual purchasing decisions. While much existing consumer-oriented research aims implicitly or explicitly to transform consumers’ attitudes and beliefs, this paper adopts a social practice framework in which consumer attitudes and beliefs play a relatively small role explaining behavior like purchasing decisions. The study focuses specifically on the practice of shopping for jeans, taking advantage of focus groups with adults in the United Kingdom to elicit detailed explanations of their preferences for new, recycled, or used jeans. Whereas much existing research on consumer preferences for circular or non-circular clothing assumes a direct or near-direct causal connection between preferences and behavior, we find that shopping for these different categories of jeans involves distinct social practices composed of variable meanings, materials, and competencies that are accessible to some individuals and inaccessible to others. Consequently, one avenue to increasing the relative frequency of jeans reuse becomes a matter of improving consumers’ access to the practice of shopping for used jeans rather than attempting to transform their attitudes or beliefs.