ISSN: 2222-6990
Open access
Fashion sustainability communication connects environmental responsibility with decisions about purchasing, garment care, repair, reuse, and disposal. This study investigates how these responsibilities are framed and how advertising-related narratives differ from programme and service explanations. A purposive, genre-balanced corpus comprises 16 official English-language documents from Patagonia, H&M, Levi’s, and UNIQLO and their relevant corporate parents. Each brand family contributes two narrative texts and two programme texts. Cleaned passages contain 8,950 alphabetic tokens. Descriptive dictionary counts, document prevalence, contextual reading, and two exclusion checks are combined to distinguish recurring lexical patterns from document-length effects. Care and longevity vocabulary occurs 136 times, while collection and recycling vocabulary occurs 131 times; each appears in 12 documents. Programme texts contain substantially more direct audience address and care-related vocabulary per 1,000 tokens than narrative texts. Qualitative analysis identifies restraint, extended use, circulation, and purchase-linked participation as coexisting frames. Service pages sometimes specify prices, eligibility requirements, and downstream destinations that campaign slogans leave unstated. Removing two historical narratives or the longest document preserves the aggregate prominence of care and collection themes. These descriptive results concern a selected documentary corpus, not advertising effectiveness or audited environmental performance. The article develops a claim–action–evidence framework that connects environmental wording to a specified actor, feasible clothing practice, and appropriately bounded supporting information.
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