Social transparency in the fashion world: fashion brands vs. fashion media

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.