The trends of sustainability in the luxury fashion industry: A Triple Bottom Line analysis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fashion is one of the most polluting industries in the world. While many practitioners have already incorporated sustainability as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives, there is a lack of research on how luxury fashion brands communicate their sustainability commitments and achieve sustainability. In this study, we aim to fill in the knowledge gap by identifying the longitudinal changes in perception, strategy, action, and outcome of sustainability in the luxury fashion industry. We analyze 32 years of digital newspaper articles on Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) to explore sustainability trends based on the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework leveraging different content analysis techniques (e.g. topic modeling, sentiment analysis). Our results support the increased awareness and importance of sustainability in the luxury fashion sector over time, provide theoretical implications for applying the TBL framework to the longitudinal dataset, and offer insights to business practitioners on expanding their sustainability efforts in the luxury fashion industry. The outcomes of this study enable managers to make better decisions around the long–term sustainability strategies and futureproof the luxury fashion industry’s sustainability movement.