Investigating Emerging Trends in Sustainable Fashion Research: Topics, Challenges, Strategies, and Future Directions

The apparel industry is grappling with sustainability challenges. Research in this domain has seen significant growth over the past five years. However, a clear division of topics within this field is found lacking. This study addresses this gap by examining the intersection of fashion and sustainability, assessing its evolution, characteristics, and potential research topics. The study aims to assess past literature on sustainability in fashion, ascertain research trends, and provide future research directions as well as implications. An exhaustive search was conducted using the comprehensive database of Scopus considering studies conducted before February 2023, the earliest study having been published in 1963. The resulting sample of 658 articles was analyzed using the topic modeling method of text mining in R software with latent Dirichlet allocation covering various studies on sustainable fashion from manufacturing to marketing. Results of the topic modeling analysis revealed that sustainable purchase intention and behavior are at the top of the research output. We present strategies and challenges for implementing a circular economy in the fashion sector. This study, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to apply a topic modeling approach to the examination of sustainable fashion literature. It offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary assessment of this sustainable fashion research.