Framing Sustainable Fashion Concepts on Social Media. An Analysis of #slowfashionaustralia Instagram Posts and Post-COVID Visions of the Future

Ellen Lee,Franzisca Weder

doi:10.3390/su13179976

Abstract

The global fashion industry poses a significant threat to sustainability, occasioning the emergence of sustainable fashion concepts such as slow fashion. However, sustainability as a principle is mostly established in corporate communication and reporting and sustainable fashion is mostly debated from a marketing and consumer perspective. The study at hand fills the existing gap in research on how slow fashion is portrayed on social media, focusing particularly on slow fashion, Instagram, and an Australian context. An explorative content analysis was conducted following the hashtag #slowfashionaustralia; open-coding methods were employed to enable three thematic frames to emerge from the data; namely, slow fashion as Business 2.0: An eco-marketplace, as an authentic experience of self-expression, and as a community value. Further analysis of the identified themes yielded the framing process of slow fashion on Instagram, mainly representing empowerment for women. Methodological limitations are outlined, as well as new research potential in the area of sustainability communication.

Highlights

The fashion industry’s substantial environmental and social impacts, which threaten global sustainability, have been exposed in recent years
The aim of this study was to explore how slow fashion is represented on Instagram, with a focus on the interpretations and narratives around slow fashion, related social practices, and sustainability as a moral compass
The concept of slow fashion is consistently communicated comparatively with fast fashion, and its apparent “unsustainability”, which exacerbates the message that practicing slow fashion is positive for environmental sustainability

Summary

Introduction

The fashion industry’s substantial environmental and social impacts, which threaten global sustainability, have been exposed in recent years. These impacts are exacerbated by the “fast fashion” model that currently dominates the industry and is characterized by reduced garment shelf-time production and consumption and reduced costs to encourage excessive consumption of disposable fashion [1]. Years after the sustainable fashion movement started, which was accompanied by an increase in awareness for related marketing and communication strategies [2,3], at the beginning of the new decade of the 21st century, a global pandemic revealed the continued unsustainability and fragility of the fashion market through the disruption of consumer practices and values [4], supply chains, and logistics [5]. There is an increase in empirical research and literature on sustainable consumption [7,8,9,10] and, more generally, on sustainability as a principle, social

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Results

Conclusion