Fashion Theory

Sustainability and Its Discontents: Law and the Fashion System

Fashion has long been shaped by tensions between creativity and commerce, global interconnectedness and local realities, individual expression and collective responsibility. Today, these tensions are increasingly visible in debates surrounding sustainability, accountability, and the future of the industry.

Across the EU and beyond, a sweeping transformation in sustainability governance is underway: the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence
Directive, the EU Digital Product Passport, and extended producer responsibility frameworks are collectively reshaping what the industry must disclose, trace, and account for. At the same time, the EU Omnibus Package has introduced significant uncertainty, scaling back mandatory obligations and delaying timelines, at precisely the moment when fashion’s sustainability commitments are most publicly scrutinized. As expectations of environmental and social responsibility evolve, fashion is being called upon not only to reconsider how it produces and circulates goods, but also to rethink the values, relationships, and systems of power that sustain it. These transformations raise questions that extend far beyond regulatory compliance. Who defines what constitutes responsible fashion? How are sustainability narratives constructed, communicated, and contested? Whose voices, experiences, and interests are represented in emerging approaches to accountability, and whose remain marginalized? As regulatory ambitions, market pressures, and voluntary industry initiatives intersect, the meaning of sustainability itself becomes a site of negotiation, revealing tensions between global aspirations and local realities, collective commitments and individual interests, and promises of transformation and the persistence of existing structures. Against this backdrop, fashion offers a particularly compelling lens through which to examine the shifting relationships between governance, culture, and responsibility. Its transnational character, complex networks of production and consumption, and powerful symbolic dimensions make it a distinctive space in which questions of authority, legitimacy, and collective action are continuously negotiated. This special issue of Fashion Theory invites critical and interdisciplinary perspectives on how sustainability is imagined, governed, experienced, and contested within fashion. Rather than approaching governance solely as a matter of regulation or institutional practice, it seeks to explore its cultural, social, political, and symbolic dimensions, and to consider how emerging forms of responsibility may challenge, reproduce, or transform the structures of the global fashion system.

We invite submissions addressing themes including, but not limited to:
• Fashion, sustainability, and cultural meaning — how ideas of responsibility, ethics, and sustainability are constructed, communicated, negotiated, and contested within fashion cultures.
• Fashion governance and the politics of responsibility — how regulatory change, institutional frameworks, and voluntary initiatives shape understandings of accountability, corporate responsibility, and the possibilities and limits of sustainability transformation.
• Transparency, traceability, and the politics of visibility — how emerging technologies and governance mechanisms, including Digital Product Passports, reshape understandings of fashion supply chains, labor, production, and consumption, and whose experiences remain visible or invisible.
• The aesthetics and narratives of sustainability — greenwashing, sustainable fashion imaginaries, brand identity, and the visual, symbolic, and material construction of responsible fashion.
• Industry self-regulation and collective action — how voluntary commitments, cross-border collaborations, and industry-led initiatives negotiate the relationship between commercial interests, sustainability ambitions, and collective responsibility.
• Circularity, materiality, and the cultural afterlife of garments — secondhand fashion, repair, reuse, recycling, and the changing meanings of value, ownership, consumption, and waste.
• Global inequalities and situated perspectives on sustainability — how sustainability agendas and governance frameworks are experienced, negotiated, or resisted by workers, producers, and communities across different geographical, social, and economic contexts, particularly in the Global South.
• Fashion histories and the genealogies of sustainability — what fashion history, dress practices, and material culture reveal about changing ideas of responsibility, resourcefulness, consumption, and reform.