Unravelling Tales of Truth: The Digital Battle Between Greenwashing Giants and Fashion Eco-Warriors
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis challenges the contested terrain of sustainability discourses in the global fashion industry, positioning digital platforms as battlefields in the struggle between environmental activism and corporate greenwashing. With a focus on my conceptual contributions, shiny sustainability and digital eco-witnessing, it examines how power, discourse, and digital media combine to mediate public discourse of fashion's environmental crisis. Through a qualitative online content analysis of fast fashion giants H&M and SHEIN, and sustainability-focused influencers Venetia La Manna and Janet Chemitei, this study reveals how online storytelling is used to conceal or expose the true cost of overproduction and waste within the fashion industry. In the thesis, I theorise shiny sustainability as a form of greenwashing, which feeds on glossy and affective narratives created by industry players to generate moral gratification without making credible, evidence-based claims of their sustainability claims. This framework expands and enriches theories of greenwashing and hyperreality. It illustrates how corporate storytelling consolidates consumerism and environmentalism within a performative, commercially driven framework. This narrative diverts consumers' attention from critically questioning these brands, continuing the fast fashion cycle. In comparison, another contribution I included is digital eco-witnessing. This conceptual idea is theorised as a form of environmental testimony for the social media age, whereby independent producers use low-cost, affective, and evidence-driven content to humanise, document, and bear witness to the environmental crisis. Unlike mainstream environmental witnessing, which has a tendency to focus on ecologically contained and geographically limited environmental catastrophes, digital eco-witnessing in fashion makes the global circulation of waste visible, bringing distant harms into proximity with consumer choice in everyday life. By documenting …
abstract: This thesis challenges the contested terrain of sustainability discourses in the global fashion industry, positioning digital platforms as battlefields in the struggle between environmental activism and corporate greenwashing. With a focus on my conceptual contributions, shiny sustainability and digital eco-witnessing, it examines how power, discourse, and digital media combine to mediate public discourse of fashion's environmental crisis. Through a qualitative online content analysis of fast fashion giants H&M and SHEIN, and sustainability-focused influencers Venetia La Manna and Janet Chemitei, this study reveals how online storytelling is used to conceal or expose the true cost of overproduction and waste within the fashion industry. In the thesis, I theorise shiny sustainability as a form of greenwashing, which feeds on glossy and affective narratives created by industry players to generate moral gratification without making credible, evidence-based claims of their sustainability claims. This framework expands and enriches theories of greenwashing and hyperreality. It illustrates how corporate storytelling consolidates consumerism and environmentalism within a performative, commercially driven framework. This narrative diverts consumers' attention from critically questioning these brands, continuing the fast fashion cycle. In comparison, another contribution I included is digital eco-witnessing. This conceptual idea is theorised as a form of environmental testimony for the social media age, whereby independent producers use low-cost, affective, and evidence-driven content to humanise, document, and bear witness to the environmental crisis. Unlike mainstream environmental witnessing, which has a tendency to focus on ecologically contained and geographically limited environmental catastrophes, digital eco-witnessing in fashion makes the global circulation of waste visible, bringing distant harms into proximity with consumer choice in everyday life. By documenting …
author: Letwaba, Madinani Katleho
language: en
date published: 2025-12
date modified: 2026-07-24T04:40:09Z
provider: Stellenbosch University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University