| Résumé: |
There has been lots of changes in the fashion industry’s discourse and actions around sustainability over the past decades and this master’s thesis explores the evolution of this discourse between 2010 and 2020 with an ecolinguistics’ perspective. Building on the textual data analysis software IRaMuTeQ, I analyzed 84 annual and sustainability reports published by five leading international fashion groups: H&M, Inditex, Nike, Adidas and Fast Retailing. I searched for the frequency and similarity analysis of a pre-defined sustainability lexicon. The discourse is then confronted to an ecosophy and ranked regarding its alignment with the principles of sustainability, following Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework to structure the analysis. The findings show an evolution of the discourse towards a more precise and accurate discourse around sustainability, picking up the latest trends in sustainability such as circular economy and the 5R strategy. However, the discourse fails to address the “raison d’être” of the fashion economic model, the fast fashion model. The discourse shows great understanding of the terms englobing sustainability today, however, when recontextualized, the actions of the fashion industry do not match their written statements as they continue to have negative environmental, economic and social impacts. Thus, the discourse analyzed here is ambivalent as it partially aligns with the principles of sustainability, while failing to apply them in the fashion industry’s actions. As long as the fashion industry will continue to focus only on recycling, synthetic fibers and cotton, without questioning the fast fashion business model, it will not be truly and completely sustainable. |
Mémoire [3.4 Mo]