2026 Theses Doctoral

Sustainability in the Global Fashion Industry: Insights into Experience, Learning, and the Impact of COVID-19

Thanos, Young Kim

This study examines how independent fashion designers develop, sustain, and operationalize sustainability-oriented practices over time. While existing research has extensively documented the environmental and structural challenges of the global fashion industry, less attention has been given to the lived experiences of designers who attempt to enact sustainability within these constraints. This study addresses that gap by investigating how designers come to adopt sustainability-oriented approaches, how their practices are shaped by ongoing learning, and how they navigate persistent structural tensions.

Guided by adult learning theory, and drawing primarily on experiential learning as an interpretive lens, this qualitative study explores sustainability as an emergent, practice-based learning process rather than a fixed outcome. Data were collected through a multi-phase design comprising an initial survey (N=58), Critical Incident Questionnaires (N=32), and in-depth semi-structured interviews (N=18). Two focus group sessions were subsequently conducted with a subset of interview participants to triangulate and validate emergent interpretations, followed by targeted follow-up contacts with five participants to examine adaptive responses to evolving trade and supply-chain conditions. Participants were selected through purposive sampling based on sustained engagement in sustainability-oriented fashion practice. Data were analyzed using iterative, inductive coding procedures supported by cross-case comparison.

Findings indicate that sustainability-oriented practice develops through a trajectory shaped by cumulative experiences rather than single transformative events. Designers described two primary entry pathways: early value-aligned entry, in which sustainability was embedded in the founding logic of practice prior to professional entry, and later shifts prompted by professional or ethical dilemmas. Sustaining these commitments required ongoing negotiation with structural constraints, including supply chain limitations, cost pressures, and industry norms. Social participation within communities of practice played a critical role in reinforcing sustainability-oriented identities, while also revealing the limits of collective support in addressing systemic barriers.

The study also identifies the development of specific knowledge and skills—such as material literacy, supply chain navigation, and strategic communication—as essential to operationalizing sustainability commitments. The COVID-19 pandemic, which constituted an explicit fourth research question in the study’s formal design, transformed the phenomenon under study in real time—intensifying existing structural pressures, exposing the conditionality of sustainability commitments, and ultimately functioning as a structural stress test whose effects extended well beyond the pandemic itself. Subsequent disruptions, including global supply chain instability and tariff volatility, functioned not as isolated turning points but as amplifiers of existing tensions, requiring designers to adapt while maintaining core commitments.

This study contributes to adult learning scholarship in two interconnected ways. First, it reconceptualizes sustainability in professional practice not as a body of content to be transmitted but as a practice to be developed—one that requires pedagogical designs oriented toward trade-off navigation, reflective formation, and relational infrastructure rather than knowledge transfer alone. Second, it proposes flexibility, reorganization, recalibration, and reinvention as the four constitutive capacities of complexity learning under sustained structural disruption—a framework with implications for how adult education prepares practitioners across professional domains where stable mastery is no longer the appropriate developmental horizon. It also extends sustainability scholarship in fashion by foregrounding the experiential and developmental dimensions of practice, offering insights relevant to educators, industry stakeholders, and designers seeking to navigate and sustain ethical commitments within complex systems.