Fashion With a Conscience: A Review of Sustainable Fashion Landscape Using TCCM Framework

The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry, accounting for 10% of carbon emissions. Consumers have become more sensitive to the environmental impact of their shopping decisions, forcing companies to respond. This has drawn immense attention from industry and academia alike, and it thus becomes imperative to see the evolution of the discipline from an academic research lens. The study examines 41 years of scientific research in Sustainable Fashion (SF) through the Theory-Context-Characteristics-Methodology (TCCM) framework and content analysis of Scopus data comprising 1,739 articles from 860 journals. Results reveal that the field is still developing but has been approached from multiple disciplines and methodologies. A structured bibliometric and content analysis enabled an in-depth study of the field’s evolution. Further, the results of bibliographic coupling indicate clusters of emerging themes in SF scholarship, such as Sustainable Fashion, Sustainable Fashion Consumption, Circular Economy, Eco-Tech Fashion, Technological Innovations, Circular Consumption, Eco-Fashion and Zero-Waste Fashion. The study adds value to the extant literature by proposing a conceptual framework emerging from thematic clusters. In addition to examining the current trends, the study provides future research directions to increase scholarship sustainably.