Unveiling Production: Marketing Practices That Challenge Fashion’s Hidden Realities

Abstract

This paper explores how fashion-based social enterprises (FSEs) integrate the people and communities who produce their products into marketing strategies. These strategies typically highlight social purpose and benefit the individuals involved, offering an alternative to the mainstream fashion system’s overt growth-driven practices. However, while many aim to foster ethical and meaningful representation of their beneficiaries, challenges remain in ensuring that marketing narratives do not inadvertently reinforce power imbalances. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with 16 FSEs, the research adopts Stuart Hall’s theory of representation to critically analyze how consumer skepticism, avoiding exploitative brand storytelling, seeking consent, and positionality are navigated in marketing practices. Diverse strategies are utilized to demystify the production process, ensure transparency, and provide equitable representation. Yet, the potential for exploitation persists, particularly when balancing ethical commitments with commercial viability. Most considered best practices in centering producer voices and fostering reciprocal relationships in their marketing practices, maintaining these commitments requires ongoing resistance to market pressures that can commodify social impact. These insights contribute to discussions on alternative fashion systems by examining how these enterprises redefine the fashion marketing system through ethical frameworks. We highlight the opportunities and limitations of these models, emphasizing the need for continuous critical engagement to ensure that people-centered narratives are not exploitative and remain reciprocal.