Carys Egan-Wyer

Senior lecturer

From Strategic Opportunity to Existential Imperative : Sustainability discourses in fashion retail.

Author

Carys Egan-Wyer

Summary, in English

Organisations that deviate from ethical expectations regarding their behaviour risk damaging their image and, hence, threatening their very survival (refs.). Contemporary representations of fashion retail in media and popular culture—which depict fashion retail as a key contributor to the climate crisis—are, therefore, a challenge for retailers in general and for fashion retailers in particular. In this paper, I analyse sustainability communications from the fashion industry using an institutional perspective, which reminds us that organisations are embedded in social contexts and corporate communications are tools for negotiating legitimacy within those contexts. The findings illustrate how fashion retailers co-opt the language of climate activism to re-establish the industry’s legitimacy in the face of a climate crisis that threatens its very existence.

Department/s