Marketing Sustainable Fashion: Trends and Future Directions

Abstract

The fashion industry is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Sustainable fashion (SF) aims to address this issue by designing, creating, and marketing socially and environmentally responsible products. This paper provides a broad overview of the extant literature on SF marketing to understand the trends and future directions. The paper starts with a discussion on sustainable consumption and marketing in the particular context of fashion and ends with potential research gaps, which have scope for further work. For the analysis, 97 research papers were selected based on a structured, systematic search with a particular set of keywords. The review finds that marketing SF from a customer’s perspective has been emphasized in the existing literature. Widely studied topics include consumer behavior, purchase behavior, and the attitude–behavior gap. Further research is required to explore how SF can gain from B2B marketing, circular economy, sustainability-oriented innovations, and subsistence markets, particularly in emerging economies. This paper contributes to theory and practice by providing state-of-the-art sustainable fashion marketing research, identifying research gaps, and providing future research directions.