“I Do What I Do to Drive Change”: The Social-Symbolic Work of Sustainable Fashion Influencers

Abstract

This paper aims to study how sustainable fashion influencers (SFIs) conduct social-symbolic work in their efforts to purposefully transform their followers’ fashion consumption patterns. We conducted a netnographic study of the Finnish SFI scene, including observations of the SFIs’ social media content and complementary in-depth interviews with a subset of SFIs. We identified three types of social-symbolic work conducted by the SFIs: identity work (narrating, reflecting and balancing), community work (tightening, expanding and magnetizing) and practice work (shaping meanings, competences, and materials). Most of the SFIs studied were micro-influencers in Finland. The paper contributes to research on sustainable fashion by highlighting the role of SFIs as drivers of institutional and cultural change, the role of social media in this pursuit, and the way sustainable fashion consumption is interlinked with digital life.

Keywords:

• sustainable fashion
• social media influencers
• institutional theory

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank the sustainable fashion influencers who participated in our study by taking part in the interviews and providing their valuable insights and thoughts regarding their own consumption behavior, as well as of their ideas about social media presence as a sustainability influencer.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

A lot of the data acquired for this study include transcriptions of in-depth interviews, and thus cannot be shared due to privacy issues. In addition, due to the study’s qualitative nature and due to using netnography as a research method, the data consist also of researchers’ immersion diaries (not written in English) and are thus irrelevant to share.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Foundation for Economic Education, Finland.

Notes on contributors

Ines Kaivonen

Ines Kaivonen is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Management and Business Tampere University (Finland). Her research interests are in sustainable fashion, and the sustainability transitions occurring in the fashion field, focusing on the different change agents driving the transitions, which she examines through the lens of institutional theory. [email protected]

Nina Mesiranta

Dr. Nina Mesiranta is a Senior Research Fellow in the Wastebusters research group at Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University (Finland). Her research interests include how sustainable circular economy can be advanced through change agents such as sustainable fashion influencers or circular fashion startups. She has published, e.g., in Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, International Journal of Consumer Studies, and Journal of Cleaner Production.

Elina Närvänen

Elina Närvänen is a Professor of Services and Retailing at Tampere University (Finland). Her research interests are in sustainable consumption and production, practice theory and collective consumption. Her work has been published in for example the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Management, European Journal of Marketing and Industrial Marketing Management.