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Introduction
Sustainable fashion doesn’t make any sense. It’s a contradiction in terms. According to the Oxford Dictionary: Fashion is “the production and marketing of new styles of goods, especially clothing and cosmetics”. Sustainable is “able to be maintained at a certain rate or level”. On one hand, we have the pressure to be new; on the other, the imperative to maintain. Sustainable fashion is an oxymoron […]. (Rickey, 2014)
Fashion and sustainability are often considered to be opposing concepts (Rickey, 2014; Lundblad and Davies, 2016). Because the current fashion system is mainly driven by speed, change, planned obsolescence, disposable trends and aesthetic fads, it is a challenge to associate it with sustainability, which connotes longevity and reusability (Ozdamar Ertekin and Atik, 2015). However, the detrimental societal and environmental impacts of global fashion industry pressingly call for a more sustainable fashion system (Biehl-Missal, 2013; Fletcher, 2013; Kennedy et al., 2017; Ozdamar Ertekin and Atik, 2020a, 2020b).
The problems associated especially with fast fashion industry – such as the exploitation of garment workers, the destruction of the ecosystem, the depletion of the natural resources and the increasing textile waste (Morgan and Birtwistle, 2009; Fletcher, 2013; Blanchard, 2013) – are so complex that they need to be treated as wicked problems within a multitude of social, economic and cultural influences (Kennedy, 2016; Kennedy et al., 2017). Accordingly, their solutions require a structural change through the involvement of multiple stakeholders at all – micro, meso and macro – levels. Recently, Ozdamar Ertekin and Atik (2020a) outlined the roles of multiple institutional constituents of the fashion system at different levels (such as the role of designers, big fast fashion brands, other actors of the fashion supply chain, luxury brands, fashion organizations and associations and consumers) in potentially advocating change toward a more sustainable fashion system. In this study, we examine with a closer look one of the most challenging issues of the complex sustainability problem of the industry, which is the fashion consumers’ restless desire for the new that contributes to growing textile waste and puts pressure on the actors of the supply chain.
Our study is conceptual in nature. Through an extensive review of the literature in fashion, sustainability, social marketing and consumer studies, it theoretically explores...