A Triple Bottom Line Analysis of Sustainability Trends in the Luxury Fashion Industry: A Topic Modeling Approach

Sustainability currently is a hot topic in the luxury fashion industry. While customers ponder the feasibility of combining sustainability and luxury fashion, many practitioners have already incorporated sustainability as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives. This thesis analyzed 32 years of digital newspaper articles on Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) to explore sustainability trends based on the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework through topic modeling and content analysis. The results empirically support the increased awareness and importance of sustainability in the luxury fashion sector over time, provide theoretical implications for applying the TBL framework to the longitudinal dataset, and offer insights to business practitioners on expanding their sustainability efforts in the luxury fashion industry.