The shift towards sustainability: a cross-cultural analysis of metaphors in the fashion industry

Research into the use of metaphor within business sustainability discourse has started being carried out in order to better understand how companies inform and persuade readers of their commitment towards sustainable development. The present study advances research on metaphors and sustainability by shedding light on how the fashion industry uses metaphorical language to create perceptions of sustainable behaviour through the analysis of a corpus of sustainability reports. Metaphor is intertwined with the notion of framing and the choice of one metaphor as opposed to another has consequences for how a particular issue – in this case sustainability – is framed or structured, which aspects are foregrounded, and which are backgrounded. A further aim of this study is to discover what influence culture may have on metaphor choice by analysing an exploratory corpus of 10 sustainability reports published in 2020-2022 by fashion brands with cultural backgrounds in Italy, Spain, France, the UK and the US. An integrated methodological approach was applied, drawing on corpus linguistics, Charteris-Black’s Critical Metaphor Analysis and Steen et al.’s MIPVU – Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit. Findings revealed that the conceptual representation of sustainability is centred around the MOVEMENT/JOURNEY, BUILDING, and GAMES/SPORTS source domains. Overall, there are very few sustainability metaphors unique to the five cultures. The differences lie not so much in which metaphors are used as in the aspects they are highlighting.