Abstract
The fashion industry’s entanglement in the ecological crisis persists despite extensive sustainability policies and reporting, revealing a continuing disconnect between sustainability discourse and meaningful ethical or ecological change. Within a capitalist ontology that prioritises growth, efficiency, and accumulation, stakeholders in the industrialised fashion system reproduce hierarchical structures that de-agentize participants and normalise the exploitation of both people and nature. While numerous sustainability initiatives exist, they rarely address these systemic conditions. Approaches capable of addressing these conditions, therefore, require not only technical solutions but alternative ways of organising relationships, values and agency beyond hierarchical models. Rhizomatic philosophy, with its emphasis on non-linearity, connectivity and multiplicity, offers such a non-hierarchical conceptual logic, yet it has not been applied as a contextualised sustainability framework within fashion. A conceptual gap, therefore, remains in the development of a rhizomatically informed approach to fashion sustainability.
The aim of this research is to construct an ecologically inspired, conscientizing and agentizing fashion sustainability framework grounded in rhizomatic philosophy and guided by an ethics of care epistemology. The study is guided by the research question: How can the principles of a rhizomatic philosophy, informed by an ethics of care, be utilised to weave a conscientizing and agentizing fashion sustainability framework?
Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative critical discourse analysis approach grounded in textual data and informed by intersectional constructivism. Fashion sustainability discourses are analysed to examine how dominant narratives reproduce growth logics, hierarchy, and de-agentization, and to explore how alternative, ecologically inspired principles of organisation and value may be articulated. Rhizomatic principles such as multiplicity, connectivity, cartography and asignifying rupture are employed as analytical lenses, alongside an ethics of care emphasis on relational responsibility and interdependence. Methodological reasoning is embedded throughout the research, in accordance with its non-hierarchical, relational epistemology.
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The findings indicate that prevailing sustainability discourse frequently reinforces the very conditions it seeks to reform by displacing ethical responsibility onto individuals or technologies while leaving entrenched power relations unchallenged. Agency among fashion stakeholders is constrained by hierarchical modes of organisation, narrowing their capacity to act with care toward people and the planet. In response, the research develops the Rhizocare Fashion Ecosystem framework as a non-linear, relational sustainability model that interweaves rhizomatic philosophy, ethics of care, and fashion systems thinking. The framework functions as both a diagnostic and strategic tool, enabling fashion sustainability researchers to identify ethical and systemic leverage points within fashion practices and relationships. Its application across two organisations demonstrates its adaptability and analytical utility.
The main contribution to new knowledge lies in the weaving of a conscientizing and agentizing sustainability framework that challenges commodity-based capitalist ontology and supports regenerative, care-centred approaches to fashion sustainability. By integrating plural epistemologies, including Global South narratives, application of the Rhizocare framework advances an alternative paradigm oriented toward relationality, ecological reciprocity and long-term systemic transformation.