This month we have invited model and actress Megan Taylor to guest write for us. As a blogger and influencer, Megan asks "can bloggers really be sustainable with their fashion?" Take it away Megan!

The pressure on the public and especially influencers around the subject of sustainability is getting stronger every day. Fast fashion and plastic consumption are on everyone’s mind and a lot of bloggers are worrying about being seen in their Instagram Stories, YouTube videos, blogs and Instagram posts with plastic bottles, plastic cups, cheap clothes that are creating fast fashion. The likes of Stacey Dooley’s investigative show for the BBC delving into fast fashion wrecking our planet and the Telegraph’s article on charity shops being inundated with poor quality clothes that they have to send to landfill is terrifying. We need to try our best to make sure that we are not part of this problem.

KEEPING OUR AUDIENCE'S ATTENTION

It seems that to be a successful fashion influencer there is a constant demand for new content, each and every day. We need to be seen as current, follow and create new trends to keep our audiences interested. I have looked at my most popular Instagram posts over the last year and apart from “announcement” content, my posts which contain new, current and exciting fashion pieces always rank most popular. These posts excite people, they want to know where you got those items from and in turn boost our engagement rate which we all know is imperative right now.

AFFILIATE LINKS

Most fashion bloggers use affiliate links through the likes of Reward Style, Shop Style Collective and SkimLinks. If we post images featuring old clothes that are no longer in stock, we cannot link them and therefore we will make no money from these posts if they are not a paid collaboration.

HOW CAN WE COMBAT THIS PROBLEM?

STYLISTS

To help reduce our consumption of clothes is to work our blogging lives in the same way stylists do. Stylists get in touch with PR when they need items for shoots, they call in what they need and pack it up and send it back to the PR or brand after the shoot. The stylist and their client get current clothes and the brand and PR get the coverage and images to help promote their product.

There are problems with this though. The reason audiences have turned to bloggers over magazines is that bloggers are more “real”. We wear what we want, what we love and what we actually own and have spent our money on. If we are just borrowing clothes from brands and PR then we don’t actually own the item, we may not love it enough to spend our hard-earned cash on the item so why should our audience part with their money? If we used this stylist hack then we would effectively just be models for those brands creating our own editorial magazine style shoot but in a street style way.

RETURNS

The Daily Mail wrote recently about how bloggers and consumers are buying clothes, wearing them once for Instagram content and then sending them back. Apart from cheating your audience with clothes that you are pretending to “love and own” you are actually doing harm to the environment with the constant ordering and returns process. Think of all those plastic bags that your online orders come in and all of the fumes caused by the vehicles getting your parcel to you and back again.

THE REALITY

We all need to be a little more conscious with our purchases, love our clothes until they are falling apart and then sew them back together. Let’s not lose the love of fashion but let’s also love and respect our planet at the same time.

You can read more from Megan's blog here

View Megan's Influencer Page here