With the growing importance of ESG as a must-have business strategy, this study attempted to analyze the current state of ESG practices in the Korean fashion businesses. The ESG cases of fashion business were collected from news articles searched on the largest Korean internet portal by November 2021 from October 2020 when the number of articles began to increase meaningfully. Three hundred ninety one ESG cases of 112 fashion manufacturing brands and 332 ESG cases of 49 retail brands were analyzed. Casual and outdoor/sportswear brands among fashion manufacturers were most active in ESG practices, and various online and offline retailers were practicing ESG. Approximately one-third of the fashion brands were positioned as eco-friendly concept. While environmental practices were the most practiced ESG, governance was the least practiced. Among environmental practices, fashion manufacturing businesses were most active in eco-friendly product development, while retail businesses were in eco-friendly campaign-event-service and eco-friendly packaging. The most active social practice was the contribution to communities, followed by retail businesses’ sharing growth with partner businesses. Governance practices were focused on the structure and operation of the board. Various ESG collaborations with various partners were also observed. The research result is meaningful verifying and diagnosing the ESG practices of the Korean fashion businesses.

Much of the sustainability research has orientated around the production side of the business model, changing a consumer’s consumption pattern, such as extending the usage of a product and reducing the frequency of purchase and even promoting shared use, is now being recognised as a critical facet of working towards sustainability. The focus on the consumer perspective, their usage and response to alternative modes of garment use is under represented in the research to-date, which has predominantly focused on the point of design or disposal. Employing a multi-method qualitative study, this research engages with consumers to build the critical insights currently pertinent but neglected in shifting consumers towards more sustainable fashion consumption practices. Fashion management is important as evidenced by a global garment industry valued at around US $1.7 trillion and employing approximately 75 million people (Fashion United; International Labour Organisation). However, there are significant environmental costs from resource inputs, manufacture, use and disposal of clothing. This impact occurs while around only 30% of clothing, valued at around £4000, in our wardrobes was worn in the last year (Williams, 2016). Coupled with an increase in clothing purchases, this has led to the phenomena of disposing of garments that may only have been worn a few times. Disposal of clothing is a key tenet of sustainability, with high volumes of purchases propelled by discourses of “fast fashion” (Bianchi and Birtwistle, 2010) resulting in approximately one million tonnes of clothes being disposed annually in the UK (Defra, 2009). Whilst a need for consumer behaviour change is clearly identified for systemic change within fashion management, little insight is provided as to how this can be facilitated. From a production and retail perspective, sustainable clothing discussions have been appropriated into mainstream retail practice (in brands such as People Tree, Patagonia, Everlane, H&M) however one of the presented barriers of a mainstream adoption of this approach, is the lack of trust and weak incentives for consumers. With the premise of extending understandings beyond interested niche fashion groups to mainstream society, we explore tensions and opportunities in extending clothing acquisition practices towards a circular approach. Focusing on fashion consumers (considered as purchasing one fashion item per week) we carried out a multi-method ethnographic study over six months to intervene and challenge consumer fashion consumption habits. We augment the conventional model of fashion consumer behaviour of ‘buy-own-dispose’ and contribute an emergent understanding of the challenges, barriers and opportunities of sustainable clothing consumption and the implications for fashion management.

The fashion supply chain, even if represents one of the most important economies of the European industry, is one of the most polluting industries in the world, being a huge consumer of water, electricity and chemicals, and discharging massive quantities of wastes to land. Despite this fact, only few contributions have offered an analysis of the practices adopted by fashion companies to reduce its environmental impact. This paper present an empirical study on the sustainability practices adoption of Italian companies in the fashion Clothing, Leather industries. The research has been conducted through an online survey submitted to a sample of 192 Italian companies, having respectively the 14 and 15 ATECO 2007 code in the AIDA database, with a response rate of 13%. The results have been analyzed through the statistical software SPSS, in order to conduct a cluster analysis and 6 different clusters have been identified. Companies belong to cluster 1 do not apply any sustainability practices, even if they are coherent with what they declare on their website. Companies of cluster 2 adopt some practices, but sustainability is not integrated into their culture. Cluster 3 is composed by companies that declare a high interest to the environment, mainly for marketing reason. This way, companies of this group represent the ones more misaligned and not consistent from the practices declared on their website and the one really implemented. Cluster 5 is composed by companies endorsing environmental sustainability as a part of the company values and a high level of practices implemented is reported. Last, companies belonging to Cluster 6 have the environmental sustainability as a strategic objective and implements sustainability practices in a consistent and coordinated way.

This paper will investigate social marketing strategies and tactics used to promote sustainable fashion consumption. It will map the impact of selected ethical awareness-raising campaigns by Asia-based sustainability champion NGO, Redress, using a case study method to determine the effectiveness of promotional practices employed in promoting environmentally sustainable fashion brands.

This paper aims to investigate the alignment between fashion companies’ CSR policy, as communicated through company website, and CSR retail practices customers can actually observe or get information about when visiting company’s retail stores. The case study analysis is carried out using the Mystery Shopping technique. The sample is made up of companies belonging to the top of the fashion luxury pyramid, whilst the visited stores are located in Italy. The purpose of this paper is to provide a classification of companies’ behaviours in deploying CRS policy at the retail level, and to highlight different levels of fit between companies’ CSR policy and CSR practices communicated at the retail-store level. Our results reveal that several companies show a mismatch between their CSR policy and CRS practices communicated in stores to customers.