Creative Exploration of the Consumption and Disposal Habits of Fashion Retail Employees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research project was conducted to assess the potential influence of fashion retail workers on industry sustainability by critiquing the standard practices of brand consumption as required by retail employers. A mixed-methodological approach, with an emphasis on creative exploration, was undertaken to examine employee experience and propose alternatives to unsustainable practices. Creative experimentation was supported by an anonymous online survey and photo submissions by individuals working in the fashion retail sector. Bourdieu’s Field Theory was applied to establish a lens from which to view retail employees as actors in the field of the fashion industry that functions as a group according to a unique habitus with specific dispositions. Use of Aesthetic Labour practices by fashion brands encourage the development of this habitus and manipulation of employees for the sole benefit of the company. The modes of interaction as both marketer and consumer are acquired and learned within the job and build upon the employee’s existing experience. It is therefore argued that these learned behaviours could be altered in a direction more beneficial to the employees themselves, as well as for improving the industry as a whole. The main finding of this research study was the need for awareness regarding the current economically and environmentally unsustainable expectations for fashion retail employees. Further participant-informed research would be beneficial and assist in broadening awareness. This information brought directly to the employees themselves has the potential to instigate significant change to an industry facing new challenges in both the retail and environmental sector
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".