Consumer Versus Corporate Moral Responsibilities for Creating a Circular Fashion: Virtue or Accountability?

Abstract

Scholars in the fashion discipline have become more attentive to investigating how the fashion business can become more circular. In the past, many of the studies focused on identifying the supporting and/or hindering factors when creating a circular fashion (CF). Despite the insights these studies provide, their contributions are relatively limited in that many of them are exploratory in nature and skewed toward understanding CF from the stance of fashion companies who are situated at the supply side of the fashion economy. In contrast, little attention has been given to how consumers, on the demand side, perceive a CF. We employed a mixed-method approach using 332 respondents’ narrative data and empirically identified whether consumers attribute moral responsibility to fashion companies as well as to themselves for creating a CF and, if so, whether there are any nuanced differences in their perceptions of consumer versus corporate moral responsibilities for a CF.