Evidence for Ethical Consumption: The Social Network Structure of Companion Animal Fashion and Vegan Fashion

Abstract

Animal rights movements led to changes in social perceptions toward animals. In fashion, animals are closely related to ethical fashion consumption. The fashion industry has been known to take priority over animal welfare as it relates to matters of productivity (Rollin, 2006). Ethical clothing is often related to environmental responsibility, employee welfare, slow fashion, and animal welfare. Relatedly, animal welfare groups encouraged clothing organizations to adopt more animal-friendly processes, such as no animal testing and replacing animal furs with vegan materials (Reimers et al., 2016). The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between companion animal fashion and vegan fashion as evidence of ethical fashion practices. Raw data for this study includes web magazines, blog postings, and new articles which relate to companion animal fashion, vegan fashion, and ethical fashion. Data were collected through web crawling. A text mining program was used to analyze the frequency and centrality of main keywords. Consequently, the common network structure of the companion animal fashion/vegan fashion and ethical fashion extracted five keywords: “animal,” “brand-image,” and “materials.” Among those, brand-image (337.83), materials (155.17), animal (81.5) had higher level of between centrality. It means that these were powerful bridge concepts connecting variables. Environment (48.0), and sustainability (19.67) were also common keywords. These five words are the core concepts that make companion animal fashion and vegan faction to be ethical fashion.