Social Transparency in the Fashion World

As a major player in the world economy, the fashion industry has a wide-reaching impact on the lives of people around the world and is also intertwined with a number of pressing environmental and social themes including climate change, working conditions, diversity, inclusion, human rights, and anim...

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Main Author: Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Verona 2025-06-01
Series:Iperstoria
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Online Access:https://iperstoria.it/article/view/1509
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author Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli
author_facet Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli
author_sort Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli
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description As a major player in the world economy, the fashion industry has a wide-reaching impact on the lives of people around the world and is also intertwined with a number of pressing environmental and social themes including climate change, working conditions, diversity, inclusion, human rights, and animal welfare. For this reason, fashion brands are keen to highlight their actions to address such concerns, while seeking to enhance perceptions of transparency, convey an image of trustworthiness, and distinguish themselves from competitors. This paper investigates how fashion brands communicate social transparency in relation to key environmental and social themes trending in the fashion world. It aims to identify which themes are the most prominent and how these may differ from those promoted by the fashion media that have a crucial role in driving awareness of and ongoing interest in them. A corpus consisting of the sustainability reports of fashion brands was compared to a complementary dataset of textual material relating to social transparency extracted from the website communications of a global fashion media company. Both the fashion brand corpus and the fashion media dataset were submitted to semantic and lexical analysis with corpus software, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The results indicate that the fashion brands placed considerably more emphasis on the environmental aspects of social transparency linked to manufacturing processes, while the fashion media company provided much greater visibility to social issues such as diversity, inclusion, and human rights. The findings can be applied in instructional settings in the areas of business communication and fashion writing to help learners acquire skills useful for producing texts that promote social transparency.
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spelling doaj-art-d7c7accf62384fd994f01d7da7fe8b7b2025-08-20T03:31:27ZengDepartment of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of VeronaIperstoria2281-45822025-06-012510.13136/2281-4582/2025.i25.15091478Social Transparency in the Fashion WorldBelinda Crawford Camiciottoli0https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8616-1785University of CalabriaAs a major player in the world economy, the fashion industry has a wide-reaching impact on the lives of people around the world and is also intertwined with a number of pressing environmental and social themes including climate change, working conditions, diversity, inclusion, human rights, and animal welfare. For this reason, fashion brands are keen to highlight their actions to address such concerns, while seeking to enhance perceptions of transparency, convey an image of trustworthiness, and distinguish themselves from competitors. This paper investigates how fashion brands communicate social transparency in relation to key environmental and social themes trending in the fashion world. It aims to identify which themes are the most prominent and how these may differ from those promoted by the fashion media that have a crucial role in driving awareness of and ongoing interest in them. A corpus consisting of the sustainability reports of fashion brands was compared to a complementary dataset of textual material relating to social transparency extracted from the website communications of a global fashion media company. Both the fashion brand corpus and the fashion media dataset were submitted to semantic and lexical analysis with corpus software, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The results indicate that the fashion brands placed considerably more emphasis on the environmental aspects of social transparency linked to manufacturing processes, while the fashion media company provided much greater visibility to social issues such as diversity, inclusion, and human rights. The findings can be applied in instructional settings in the areas of business communication and fashion writing to help learners acquire skills useful for producing texts that promote social transparency.https://iperstoria.it/article/view/1509fashion brandsfashion mediasocial transparencycorpus analysis
spellingShingle Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli
Social Transparency in the Fashion World
Iperstoria
fashion brands
fashion media
social transparency
corpus analysis
title Social Transparency in the Fashion World
title_full Social Transparency in the Fashion World
title_fullStr Social Transparency in the Fashion World
title_full_unstemmed Social Transparency in the Fashion World
title_short Social Transparency in the Fashion World
title_sort social transparency in the fashion world
topic fashion brands
fashion media
social transparency
corpus analysis
url https://iperstoria.it/article/view/1509
work_keys_str_mv AT belindacrawfordcamiciottoli socialtransparencyinthefashionworld