Fashion sustainability advocacy and mindful consumption in the digital age: an analysis of Instagram influencers in the UK and Europe

Social media has become a prominent communication channel for fashion brands, playing a key role in influencing today's consumer behaviour. One platform that has gained significant popularity in the past decade is Instagram, with its visually oriented focus. This platform has created dynamic new ways for brands, consumers, and content creators to interact. As Instagram continues to grow, it has increasingly been used for sustainability discourse, a contemporary theme in the fashion industry due to the environmental and social impacts. Previous research on Instagram's sustainability discourse has primarily focused on the perspectives of consumers and brands (Palakshappa et al., 2024; Marcella, 2023), particularly brand communications (Pookulangara et al., 2024; Milanesi et al., 2022) and consumer engagement strategies (Shahrin et al., 2022; Danielle et al., 2021). There has been limited exploration of how influencers independently communicate and advocate for sustainable fashion (Vladimirova et al., 2023; Jacobson & Harrison, 2022) and their influence on encouraging consumers to practice mindful consumption. Mindful consumption is defined as being conscious of both internal factors (thoughts and emotions) and external influences (product details and advertising) when considering the effects of consumption on oneself, society, and the environment (Garg et al., 2024). This study aims to investigate the role of Instagram content creators in shaping the sustainable fashion discourse and their influence in motivating consumers toward mindful consumption. Cognitive dissonance theory and parasocial interactions will be used as theoretical lens for this research (Cairns et al., 2022; Festinger, 1957) based on the idea that influencers can help reduce followers' cognitive dissonance regarding sustainable fashion by leveraging parasocial relationships. The influencer is considered as a friend by his/her follower despite having little or no relationship with them, where trust and admiration make their advocacy more persuasive. By sharing personal transformation stories telling how they transitioned to sustainable fashion or why they advocate for it, normalising small sustainable choices, and framing ethical fashion as aspirational and identity-enhancing, they help followers align their self-concept with mindful consumption, making sustainability feel desirable rather than restrictive (Cairns et al., 2022; Festinger, 1957). This study will employ a netnography approach (Vanini, 2019) to analyse Instagram content related to sustainable fashion communication, focusing specifically on fashion influencers based in the UK and Europe. Netnography is inspired by ethnography but applied to a digital context. It was developed by Kozinets to study digital communities. It facilitates the comprehension of behaviours and relations of participants in digital spaces (Vanini, 2019). Regardless of the absence of physical presence, members of online communities engage with each other's emotions and expressions, reflecting fundamental aspects of human nature. These communities, which operate through social media facilitate interactions, allowing members to connect and communicate effectively in a digital space. Netnography is also used to understand the impact of influencers on their followers in the context of social media. Indeed, netnography has been applied in influencer marketing to investigate parasocial relationships between influencers and viewers, particularly in the context of travel live streaming (Deng, Benckendorff, & Wang, 2022). Therefore, netnography is well-suited for our research on how influencers advocating for sustainable consumption influence their followers. The selection of influencers will focus on those who actively advocate for sustainable fashion and have developed narrative strategies to encourage their followers to adopt more mindful consumption. We will analyse their narrative strategies in their posts and their interactions with their community. In total, we plan to collect data from 40 influencers (20 from the UK and 20 from France). Additionally, we will gather comments on their posts made by their followers. We plan to use a BERT deep-learning model to identify the narratives of the influencers and examine how they interact with their community to encourage mindful fashion consumption. This research will contribute to both academia and industry in two main ways. First, it will address the gap identified in the literature regarding the role of content creators in advocating sustainability and promoting mindful consumption. Second, the research will provide actionable insights for content creators on how to effectively communicate sustainability through Instagram to encourage mindful consumption.