Sustainability and Social Responsibility

Sustainable Fashion Hashtag Activism: The Case of #FashionRevolution on Instagram

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Abstract

This research considered understanding the sustainable fashion discourse citizens are contributing and to what extent citizens are able to exercise agency through the Instagram hashtag #fashionrevolution. A qualitative content analysis was conducted using the social media monitoring tool, Brand24, to gather Instagram posts with the hashtag #fashionrevolution from March 28, 2019 to April 9, 2019. 710 unique Instagram users and their 1,076 posts were selected. As a result, the four main narrative themes of sustainable fashion were emerged: practicing forms of sustainable fashion, beliefs and values of what sustainable fashion consists of, emotions related to fashioning sustainably, and spreading knowledge and information about sustainable fashion. Citizens displayed communal, invented, skillful, and protean aspects of narrative agency. Citizens authored and articulated specific experiences through text captions, contributed to discourse, participated in communal events, created symbolic images or material forms of sustainable fashion, and criticized current methods of fast fashion production methods.

Keywords: agency, hashtag activism, Instagram, sustainable fashion

How to Cite:

Chan, H. & LEe, Y., (2022) “Sustainable Fashion Hashtag Activism: The Case of #FashionRevolution on Instagram”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 78(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/itaa.13694