How are luxury fashion brands adopting their social media content in alinement with a more sustainable business approach?

The notion of luxury and the idea of sustainability are regarded as incompatible (Davies et al., 2012; Janssen et al., 2015). Luxury is associated with an excessive and opulent lifestyle, while sustainability promotes abstinence and modesty (Cvijanovich, 2011; Kapferer and Michaut-Denizeau, 2014). At the same time, society expects luxury brands to be committed to sustainable practices and to openly communicate about them. This poses difficulties for luxury brands in terms of sustainability communication. Research has shown that through integrating sustainability narratives into their communication, luxury brands risk alienating luxury consumers (Kong, Witmaier and Ko, 2021). The challenge for luxury brands is therefore to find strategies to maintain a glamorous and exclusive image while meeting consumer demands and informing about sustainable practices. An additional challenge is to communicate about sustainable initiatives in a way, that builds credibility and trust, as consumers have become sceptical of brands' sustainability claims due to increasing greenwashing scandals. This study aims to identify how luxury fashion brands tackle this challenge and analyses how sustainability communication is done on the most popular social media platform Instagram. The four luxury brands selected for this study are Gucci, Stella McCartney, Chloé and Prada. To conduct the research, 40 sustainability related posts from each brand were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The goal was to identify what aspects of their sustainability practices brands communicate and how they communicate. The findings are thus divided into two parts: content topics and content style. The results show that due to the rising awareness of sustainability all four brands have acknowledged the importance of communicating about their efforts related to sustainable practices. However, they have incorporated this into their social media presence to different degrees and with different approaches. Overall, there is still the tendency to present information on sustainability practices in an abstract and vague way, as identified in previous research. Brands often fail to provide specific details and concrete evidence with their sustainability claims, or overuse sustainability buzzwords, such as ‘recycled’, ‘ethically sourced’ or ‘raw material’ in their communication. These approaches can raise distrust about the actual impact and truth of brands' sustainability efforts and lead to suspicions of greenwashing. In this regard, next to the overuse of sustainability buzzwords, the study also found that on the other hand luxury brands often paraphrase sustainability terms. This helps them to maintain their elevated and sophisticated speech when communicating about the topic sustainability.