Semester of Graduation

Spring 2022

Degree

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Textiles, Apparel and Merchandising

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

The fashion industry promotes a culture of frivolous consumption, especially with the offering of fast fashion items nearly everywhere. With the rise of social media platforms, ordinary people have been able to create a large following of people who are interested and persuaded by their opinions and lifestyles, thus being deemed a social media influencer. Social media influencers who have utilized their platforms to speak out about the detrimental effects of fast fashion and conspicuous consumption and for the need to shop with sustainable values in mind for the health of society as well as the environment are known as sustainable fashion influencers. The goal of this study is to bring awareness to consumers about the concept of sustainability in the fashion sector.

Data was gathered from eight sustainable fashion influencers on Twitter. These influencers were chosen based on their interest in sustainable fashion, number of followers, number of tweets and language. Nvivo 12 was used to conduct content analysis on a small set of the most recently posted tweets using Ncapture. In addition, supervised content mining was applied to a large set of collected data following the 7P’s of marketing mix. From the data analysis, we were able to identify seven themes: https, fashion, workers, sustainable, brands, industry, and garment. Within the seven themes, we discovered 16 sub themes: https photo, https video, https selling, https blog, fashion industry, fashion brands, fast fashion, sustainable fashion, garment workers, working conditions, sustainable wardrobe, sustainable brands, ethical brands, garment industry, garment factories and fast fashion brands. Based on previous published research on the subject of sustainable fashion the discovered themes align with previous findings. A proposed attitude behavior gap deemed valid in our findings, where sustainable fashion influencers are ultimately continuing to push overconsumption of products weather sustainable or not. Rather than the traditional 7P’s of marketing mix, the most common marketing mix used by these sustainable fashion influencers focus on people, product and promotion. Our findings indicate that sustainable influencers actually promote consumption more so than promoting sustainable fashions, lifestyles and mindful consumption.

Committee Chair

Chuanlan Liu

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.5533

Download

Share

COinS