Chapter 3: Fashion, Sustainability, and the Free Market

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to understand:

Fashion is a ubiquitous global language and an enormously impactful, long standing, and far reaching industry. Fashion as a concept is deeply contextual, encompassing both conceptual and practical elements (Gabriel, 2021; Kawamura, 2005; Rocamora & Smelik, 2015). Fashion as a nearly universal language (Barthes, 2013) transcends geographies, ideologies, and national identities (Wilson, 2019). As an industry, it is one of the oldest industrialised sectors (Mukherjee, 2015). The fashion industry is valued at $2.5 trillion USD (The Economic Impact of the Fashion Industry, 2019), and, when compared to the GDP of countries, is representative of the world’s seventh largest economy (The State of Fashion 2017, 2016). In these ways, fashion touches nearly everyone on the planet (Amed et al., 2021).