The Concept of Sustainable Fashion From Past to Present: A Bibliometric Approach on the Basis of Pre-Covid Data

In recent years, the concept of sustainability has been gaining importance in every aspect of life. Both environmental disasters and climate change have been raising awareness about the concept of sustainability for every member of any society. As members of a society become more conscious of such issues, companies producing goods and services for the society will have to revisit their practices which have negative consequences on the environment. This is also applicable to the fashion industry which harms the environment the most after the petrochemical industry. In this study, the emergence and development of sustainability in the fashion industry in scientific research have been examined. Considering what kinds of environmental problems that the prevailing ‘fast fashion’ concept creates in reality, the importance of sustainable fashion was studied. In this regard, the emergence of sustainable fashion and the progress which has been made in academic studies on this topic constitute the main purpose of this study. 96 studies (63 articles, 17 book chapters, 11 conference proceedings and 5 books) are examined. This study encompasses academic studies published till April 2020, when Covid-19 started to affect the whole world negatively. We examined the pre-Covid data in this study because Covid-19 changed the perception of customers to the fashion, fashion industry and fast fashion concept itself. Frequency analyses of articles, conference proceedings, books and book chapters on sustainable fashion were carried out on the basis of a classification made by year, country, type of study, field and research method. In addition, frequencies and content analyses were done by using the keywords in this study. Furthermore, bibliometric and citation analyses were conducted on network diagrams created on the basis of citation details, and leading works and authors in this field. VOS Viewer software were used to do frequency, network and bibliometric analyses, and n-Vivo software used for content analysis.