ABSTRACT
Sustainability in supply chain management (SCM) has attracted the attention of both researchers and practitioners during the last decades. While traditional SCM mostly focuses on the risks and rewards regarding the economic dimension, sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) integrates the environmental and social dimensions into economic considerations by building the triple bottom line (TBL) approach. TBL is mostly used interchangebly with the notion of sustainability and provides a coherent framework for corporate practices in diverse industries. Since the fashion industry has been faced with increasing pressure from stakeholders, it has taken up the challenge of managing sustainability crises by increasing commitment to the TBL during the past decades. This chapter attempts to discuss some intriguing examples of SSCM practices in this industry to conceive how some brands are performing extremely well and some are struggling to survive. After mapping the literature through a two-step systematic literature review (SLR) process to present the evolution of the SSCM context in the fashion industry, the approaches and trends in the fast and slow fashion brands are covered along with various case studies. Following the TBL approach, the chapter presents the fertile examples of companies with various sustainability agendas including the approach of Jack Wolfskin to an industry-wide problem on material usage, Nike’s remedies of its notoriously poor performance on sustainability, the struggles of H&M to support a Fair Living Wage, the adoption of ethical fashion philosophy at slow fashion brand Stella McCartney, the Cradle-to-Cradle (C2C) manufacturing philosophy of C&A, Kering’s sustainable improvement by various measurement techniques, technological breakthrough of Levi Strauss&Co. to eliminate environmental pollution and finally the circular economy strategies of Inditex.
