Consumer preferences for fast fashion products in the context of environmental awareness

Abstract With the growing prominence of fast fashion and its environmental implications, understanding consumer preferences in this context has become increasingly important. While previous studies have extensively examined environmental awareness in fashion consumption, they have predominantly relied on self-reported attitudes, offering limited insight into how consumers make trade-offs between competing product attributes in a choice-based setting. This study aims to investigate consumer preferences for fast fashion attributes and to analyse the role of environmental awareness in shaping these preferences. Data were collected through an online questionnaire survey conducted in Hungary (n = 285), incorporating a Best–Worst Scaling (BWS) experiment using the object case approach to capture the relative importance of key product attributes. Preferences were analysed using both counting measures and conditional logit models based on the maximum difference decision rule. The results indicate that value for money is the most important attribute across all consumer groups, while material , price , utilisation , and combinability are significantly less important relative to the reference attribute ( convenience ). Although descriptive differences can be observed between consumer groups with different levels of environmental awareness, interaction-based model results show that these differences are not statistically significant. The findings suggest that environmental awareness does not lead to systematically different preference structures in a choice-based context, indicating that policy interventions and managerial strategies aimed at promoting sustainable consumption should not rely solely on raising environmental awareness, but also need to account for the underlying trade-offs between competing product attributes that shape consumer decision-making.