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REVIEW article
Front. Sustain.
Sec. Circular Economy
Volume 6 - 2025 |
doi: 10.3389/frsus.2025.1499273
This article is part of the Research Topic Decoupling Growth from Resource Use: Circular Economy in Post-Growth Scenarios View all articles
The Emperor's Old Clothes: A critical review of circular fashion in grey literature
Provisionally accepted- Loughborough University London, London, United Kingdom
A consensus across industry, academics, and policy-makers holds that a circular fashion system can reduce pollution and waste while producing continued economic growth. Grey literature, understood here as reports published outside of academic journals, has been foundational to describing and promoting circular economy and circular fashion. Yet, this literature is rarely subjected to critical scrutiny, allowing evidence, claims and methods to go unexamined. This review aims to understand how value and the market are conceptualised in a circular fashion system, and what are the implications of this. The study employs a problematising review of 20 grey literature documents, including a key text of CF: the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's 2017 report A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion's Future. Textual analysis is used to identify assumptions, inferences and problem framings in the texts. These are evaluated against academic understandings, demonstrating that core concepts of the circular fashion proposal are poorly defined and unconnected to existing theory and knowledge. Existing retail practices and consumer marketing messages are central to circular fashion, while the role of the market in setting prices is ignored. A $460 billion error is revealed, refuting the claim that a circular fashion system provides an opportunity for growth. We offer a critical perspective on the role of grey literature and grey publishers in shaping policy-making and, subsequently, academic research programmes. We argue that new proposals for sustainable fashion are needed, based on established knowledge and validated models.
Keywords: Circular economy, Sustainable fashion, Circular fashion, literature review, Grey literature, value, innovation
Received: 20 Sep 2024; Accepted: 23 Jan 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hussain, Kuzmina and Koria. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Talia Hussain, Loughborough University London, London, United Kingdom
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