Sustainability reporting in the fashion companies

This chapter aims to highlight the importance, for companies operating in the fashion sector, of adopting the sustainability report. We define the conceptual framework as useful for clarifying the reasons it is essential to disclose the impact of one’s activities relating to the environmental, social, and economic spheres in a sustainability report. To this end, in Section 2, through a brief review of the literature, this corporate reporting tool is presented. Subsequently in Section 3, a series of critical arguments supporting our choice to focus attention on the companies that operate in the fashion sector is proposed, considering two questions in particular: 1) How do corporate governance bodies see the evaluation and the monitoring of the environmental and social objectives (positively and/or negatively) deriving from corporate activity? Are these activities simply a way to be compliant with the law or are they intended as a real approach to be adopted? 2) In the latter case, is it sufficient to plan and carry out the activities adequately or is it also necessary to report what has been done in a timely manner? To highlight the role and importance that companies in the fashion sector give to the main sustainability reporting tools — i.e., the sustainability report and non-financial disclosure based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) indicators — the case of the Ferragamo Group is presented in Section 4. Adopting a thematic analysis approach (Solomon & Thomson, 2009) on the sustainability report prepared by the Ferragamo Group, the contents were evaluated in terms of strategies and actions aimed at 1) reducing the negative impacts on the environment and society and 2) accelerating and intensifying the transformation processes of this fashion group towards sustainable business models. In Section 5, some final considerations and some ideas for future research are presented.