Spinning a sustainable yarn : environmental sustainability and brand story in the Australian fashion industry

In the Australian fashion industry, few fashion brands have intervened in the design of their products or the systems around their product to tackle environmental pollution and waste. Instead, support of charities (whether social or environmental) has become conflated with sustainability in the eyes of the public. Thus it is difficult to assess with any accuracy fashion brands’ response to sustainability. This article aims to address this through proposing a categorization system to structure the various interventions that a company may make. This system is applied to two case studies, analysing campaigns that respond to environmental sustainability by two established Australian brands, Country Road and Billabong. The case studies demonstrate how the interventions employed by a company, at least in the Australian context, are carefully developed to align with their brand story, revealing the interplay between the intangible aspects of a brand’s positioning and the tangible, measurable impacts of their garments.