Hedonic customer responses to fast fashion and replicas

Very little fast fashion literature focuses on pleasure‐seeking activities or luxury‐fast‐fashion and the purpose of this paper is to start addressing these gaps from the perspective of the customer.

Over eight months, a naturalistic inquiry obtained publicly available online information from customers who during their normal daily lives freely shared their opinions and reflections about fast fashion purchases.

A clearly apparent and unexpected finding is that pleasure‐seeking consumers enjoy creativity associated with ephemeral fashions and uniqueness, as these add value to the customer in different ways, depending on whether the customer is a fast fashion or a replica customer.

This study is limited to the fast fashion context and lays the foundation for future researchers to consider other contexts of fashion or luxury brands to qualify or quantify the extent of pleasure seeking and its contribution to the fashion experience in the context of the designer, the fashion brand and the customer.

Developing fashion games or fashion applications that enable the user to create and design fashion items, or mix and match fashion items will reinforce enjoyment in the design experience and linking these to the brand should reinforce positive affirmations toward the fast fashion brand.

This paper takes a fresh approach to uncover and describe hedonic customer responses to replica and fast fashion, the results of which update fast fashion and the luxury brand literatures and demonstrate the importance of creativity in the experience.