Sustainable Fashion in India: An Exploratory Study

Fashion industry has been confronted with several sustainability challenges such as usage of raw materials, natural and synthetic fibres, excess consumption of water and energy, products of chemicals, harmful by-products, and employment of child labour and so on. Today’s consumers are more aware of such sustainability challenges, which are faces by the fashion industry, resulting into an increasingly changing habits and lifestyle, in terms of consuming fashion by them. The present paper makes an attempt to investigate the opinion of Indian consumers from four cities in India regarding some issues of sustainable fashion. A questionnaire that captured the opinion of the residents of four different cities in India with respect to sustainable fashion was constructed. Convenient sampling technique was used to collect data which was statistically analysed. The questionnaire was sent to total 575 people as an online Google Form. Total 314 responses were received, which were analysed by using techniques such as KMO test and Kruskal–Wallis test. Respondents agreed the most that ethical and fair-trade practices and minimised logistics/good supply chain practice are key features of sustainable fashion. However, their agreement level differed significantly on issues related to sustainable fashion in general and on issues related to pricing and key features of sustainable fashion in particular. Respondents from different age group differed significantly in the agreement level for extending individual support to sustainable fashion. Also, there is a significant difference in the average agreement level of the respondents having different levels of education for choosing sustainable fashion products over the normal fashion if the prices of both types of products are close. Finally, the four cities, from where the data was collected, seemed to have no significant difference in accessing sustainable fashion. Overall, the findings of the present study are useful for companies from the fashion industry in analysing the significance of sustainability of their product. Also, the present study may encourage researchers to further investigate relevant issues in the Indian context.