Customers nowadays are demanding high product variety and innovative products, whilst competition is moving toward the ability to react to changes in customers’ desires. This way, managing fashion products is challenging, not only for creative and stylists, but also for supply chain and operation managers.
At the same time, sustainability is becoming a strategic imperative within the fashion market. Recent studies have explored how sustainability features are considered and implemented along fashion company supply network tiers, to achieve a comprehensive understanding of sustainable improvement in this industry.
Moreover, social media and digital channels encourage customers to be involved also in the New Product Development phase. As a consequence, fashion companies have to understand consumer needs, listening to their requirements in terms of both style than raw materials’ origin and history.
The literature is quite rich of contributions identifying the main drivers of a sustainable approach, as well as sustainable practices in different manufacturing contexts. However, since the request for sustainability is relatively new in the Fashion industry and considering the very specific peculiarities of the Fashion context, this industry should be further analysed in relation to sustainability choices undertaken by companies.
Starting from a multidisciplinary approach, this special issue collects the best papers presented at the IT4Fashion conference in 2016 regarding sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility in the fashion industry. There are three different aspects that have to be taken into account analysing fashion sustainability. The first one deals with drivers and barriers that are influencing the decisions about the adoption of sustainability actions by Fashion companies. The second one takes into account the supplier perspective, and how the sustainability practices are integrated along the Fashion SC. The third one evaluates the communication between brands and customers and it’s coherence according to the sustainability practices implemented, considering both the web-based communication and the point of sale.
The three papers included into this special issue take into account these different aspects, with different perspective, adding a contribution into this specific research field.