The bright side of fashion: Environmental and social sustainability in the south of Italy

Growing societal and academic concern regarding environmental damage has led the fashion industry to engage more with sustainability (Li et al., 2024). This paper examines Il Nido di Seta, a small fashion and agricultural cooperative in southern Italy, which has initiated a regenerative silk production program and has recently developed a collaborative project with Gucci. The study investigates Il Nido di Seta’s ecological language, addressing themes related to global fashion, ecotourism, and regional enhancement. Based on a corpus of texts from the cooperative’s website as well as texts from Gucci’s Equilibrium Impact Report 2022 and sections of the Kering Report which refer to their collaboration with Il Nido di Seta, this research analyses ecological discourse and assesses how these topics appear on Il Nido di Seta’s Instagram posts (N=363) from 2019 to 2024. Through corpus linguistics, content analysis, and framing analysis, the study explores term frequency, content alignment, and how ecological messages are conveyed multimodally on social media.