The Indian Shift: Sustainable Fashion and the Digital Native's Impact

The fashion industry has been consistently critiqued for its negative impact on the environment. In response to the growing criticism, the fashion industry is adopting practices like sharing, co ownership, and renting to mitigate its impact on the environment. Digital natives have been identified as the fastest-growing market segment and are also environmentally conscious. Accordingly, the purpose of the study is to investigate the influence of personal values (altruistic, biospheric, egoistic, and hedonic) and social norms on legitimizing sustainable fashion sharing practices of digital natives. Quantitative research methodology was adopted by applying PLS SEM to data from undergraduate and graduate students. A total of 463 usable responses were finalized. The results confirm that there is a strong and positive relationship between altruistic and biospheric values and the legitimization of fashion-sharing practices, whereas hedonic values and egoistic values have shown positive but weak associations with sustainable practices. However, after mediation by social norms, egoistic values significantly influence the acceptance of fashion-sharing practices among the digital natives. The findings of this study assist stakeholders in empirically validating a value-belief model that promotes the acceptance and internalization of eco-friendly fashion practices, while also indicating valuable implications for corporations, practitioners, and policymakers.