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Being affordable and readily disposable, fast fashion has recently been perceived as a major cause of environmental pollution and unethical labour practices. To counter these pressing global issues, sustainable fashion has been gaining in importance. Mass media has a significant role in shaping public sentiment and influencing consumers” behaviour. This paper brings the results of a small-scale quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis of three aspects of the fashion industry’s (un-)sustainability. More specifically, we examined the media's vocabulary when addressing fast and sustainable fashion. Our study followed the principles of corpus analysis and discourse analysis. We analysed 1,000 randomly selected media reports focusing on fast fashion and sustainable fashion in English in the NOW corpus. Key results of our study show that the fast fashion-related media narrative is negative, whereas the sustainable fashion-related narrative is positive, with some criticism. This study aims to contribute to the knowledge about the terminology in mass media narrative used to address fashion industry-related sustainability issues. Further, we aim to advocate how such narrative can and should be used as a vehicle for changes in consumer behaviour and company practices and, consequently, how it can impact the attainment of relevant 2030 SDGs.
Nataša Gajšt (Mon,) studied this question.