Sustainable Fashion Narratives: A Cross-Cultural Comparative Analysis of Western Luxury and Indian Craft

Abstract

Sustainable fashion resists stable definition. Theoretically contested and culturally differentiated, sustainable fashion emerges at the intersection of competing environmental imperatives, ethical obligations, and the disciplining exigencies of commercial capital. This study interrogates how sustainability is defined, communicated, and ideologically constructed across two distinct cultural formations within the fashion industry: Western luxury fashion and Indian craft-based fashion, through an examination of Instagram content published in 2025 by Stella McCartney (United Kingdom) and FabIndia (India). A corpus of 72 posts was subjected to reflexive thematic analysis, deploying inductive and deductive coding strategies alongside semantic and latent analysis to excavate the behind-the-communication logics and underlying ideological architectures that condition how meaning of sustainability is generated by each brand.

The findings demonstrate that sustainable fashion does not operate as a universally shared concept but as a series of culturally differentiated constructs, variably inflected by historical, economic, and epistemic formations. Stella McCartney articulates sustainability through explicit, measurable claims centred upon material innovation, animal welfare, and the cultivation of individual ethical consumption. FabIndia, by contrast, embeds sustainability implicitly within discourses of craft heritage, communal practice, and cultural continuity, frequently without recourse to sustainability as an explicit category of address. These divergent articulations illuminate deeper ideological asymmetries. Western sustainability is constituted through the logics of solutionism and consumer agency, whilst Indian sustainability emerges from historically sedimented practices of reuse, craft knowledge, and collective systems of value.

Notwithstanding these differences, both models converge in the transformation of sustainability into a market-facing discourse, shaped by the imperatives of visibility, aspiration, and brand positioning. The study advances a critical distinction between ‘performed sustainability’ and ‘ambient sustainability’, examining how existing institutional frameworks privilege explicit claims whilst overlooking practices that are embedded, tacit, and culturally grounded. The findings interrogate Eurocentric assumptions operative within sustainability discourse and call for a re-evaluation of whose knowledge, labour, and material practices are accorded recognition as sustainable within the asymmetric structures of global fashion systems.

The study further theorises 'capital manipulation' and 'convenient recognition' as structurally reinforcing mechanisms through which sustainability communication is selectively filtered across both cultural contexts. A parallel gap is proposed between what brands communicate as sustainability and what they structurally practise, mediated by ‘affective purchasing’ a term this study introduces to describe the process through which sustainability is translated into identity and emotional resonance among audiences rather than structural information.