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1. Introduction
COVID-19 has already had a tremendous negative impact on many industries, including the fashion industry (Orlova, 2020; Henkel, 2020). The fashion industry was growing immensely in the past decades until the COVID-19 pandemic occurred and now is facing the impending economic recession, which strongly affects the structural changes within the industry and consumer behaviour (Orlova, 2020; Henkel, 2020). For instance, according to recent reports, more than 50% of UK consumers have bought less clothing during the lockdown and will continue to buy fewer in the future (Warden, 2020). According to Bianchi et al. (2020), big fashion reset increased online shopping, but not enough to compensate for the damages done by lockdowns and physical store closings. Greater shopping orientation to the online environment forced fashion retailers to reshape their business models by considering higher consumer expectations in terms of online shopping experiences and deliveries (Bianchi et al., 2020). Some recent studies exploring food/groceries (Moon et al., 2021; Kulkarni and Barge, 2020) and hand sanitisers (Hwang et al., 2020) argued that consumer's transition from offline to online channels might be a result of the adverse situation, such as a pandemic, whereas there is a scarcity of studies that address clothes buying (Youn et al., 2021). Thus, our study aims to shed additional light on the fashion industry.
It has been argued that pandemic-induced disruption paves the way for e-commerce to become an ever more relevant business model (UNIDO, 2020). During the pandemic, the public communications in most countries emphasised that clothing stores are not risk-free environments, especially when individuals might not adhere to necessary safety measures properly and the virus can hold on to clothes for a couple of days (Sensakovic, 2020). Before the pandemic, consumers browsed clothes online but made the purchase decisions in-store due to the emotional and tactile importance attached to shopping behaviour (Petro, 2019). In this regard, findings suggest that more than 70% of consumers buy clothes in-store versus online (e.g. Petro, 2019). These insights indicate that there are challenges for both consumers and companies during the post-lockdown period. On the demand side, it is unknown how susceptible the consumers are to the pandemic threat to continue buying clothing items in physical stores and whether they have...