The fashion industry has become increasingly dominated by the fast fashion model. With accelerated production and consumption of fashion, there are increasing social and environmental impacts. The nature of capitalism has meant many brands, particularly fast fashion, focus on profit maximisation. This often leads them to “cut corners” to increase profits usually at the expense of the environment and the workers. The purpose of this research is to support existing supply chain research and builds on this by looking at New Zealand fashion industry’s supply chains. This thesis concludes with solutions and frameworks that may help the New Zealand fashion industry take steps to improve the sustainability of its supply chain.

This thesis conducts a thematic analysis of relevant publicly available materials to examine five New Zealand fashion brands and their sustainability efforts regarding social and environmental issues. It looks for common concepts and themes in how these companies talk about their sustainability performance, while also analysing the issues that they aren’t addressing and the importance of these issues/impacts in the supply chain. This analysis uses white organic cotton t-shirts as a point of comparison looking at the different certifications regarding the brands’ sustainability efforts. The thesis then goes on to look at the best practices approaches of four global brands in addressing some of these environmental and social issues.

The main findings of this thesis are that many New Zealand brands engage in greenwashing by using eco-certifications that can confuse consumers. Greenwashing also happens through the brands advertising their sustainability efforts on certain issues, such as plastic pollution, to distract from other issues they aren’t addressing. Fashion brands need to shift to a circular economy for a greener supply chain. Processes to move towards this include ‘slow fashion’, having fewer collections per year, sustainable materials, and using different recycling methods such as chemical and water recycling.