Chapter 1 — full chapter
Chapter 1 — full chapter
1.1 What is Sustainable Fashion Communication?
In the context of a circular transition, sustainable fashion communication is defined as the practice of translating concrete sustainability actions, environmental and social impacts, long-term commitments, and real-time progress into clear, credible, and engaging messages. The overarching purpose of this practice is to empower stakeholders, including citizens, suppliers, retailers, investors, and policymakers, to understand, evaluate, and actively participate in systemic change.
Crucially, sustainability communication is not limited to communicating about sustainability through isolated campaigns, capsule collections or marketing moments. It also concerns how organisations communicate sustainability across their wider activities. This includes consumer-facing and corporate messaging, campaigns, events, e-commerce platforms and creative direction across their product offerings.
In practice, credible sustainability communication requires organisations to connect their messages to reliable evidence and clearly communicate what that evidence demonstrates. This means providing sufficient context for different stakeholders to understand the claim, including relevant information about scope, progress and limitations. Communication should reflect the organisation's actual performance and be supported by appropriate data, documentation and processes that enable claims to be verified. It should also respond to the information needs of different audiences while maintaining consistency between what an organisation communicates and what it does. In this way, transparency and accountability become practical elements of sustainability communication rather than simply communication principles.