Evaluating the Sustainability of Fashion Brands Using a Neutrosophical ORESTE Approach

Abstract

The fashion industry represents a significant source of consumerism within the global economy and requires substantial funding, eco-friendly practices, and ethical attitudes towards human capital, which are the triple bottom line of sustainability. Conscious customers are the key to reshaping the fashion industry by shopping and supporting fashion brands that adopt sustainable practices. Thus, the purpose of this study is to extract the factors affecting the decision-making process of conscious customers in selecting fashion brands adopting ethical and sustainable implementations, to present a case study covering alternative fashion brands, and to evaluate them in terms of sustainability measures. A bibliometric analysis is conducted within the scope of this research to address the most suitable and original decision-making technique; hence, a novel neutrosophic set-based ORESTE approach is proposed to rank the alternative brands. Next, after reaching the case study findings, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to illustrate the parameter changes’ impact on the result in order to validate the findings’ outcomes. Thus, this paper contributes to the literature by proposing a novel approach as an alternative to Besson ranking, extracting sustainable and ethical fashion practices of brands, and identifying the related reports and websites as references to measure sustainability in the fashion industry. The practitioners and managers can comprehend the factors to be taken into consideration by assessing the sustainability status of the particular fashion enterprises and can examine their positions in the global market within their competitors.