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This research identifies the enablers for implementing circular supply chains (CSCEs) and analyzes interrelationships between them to quantify their driving and dependence power to understand the critical CSCEs.

Initially, 10 CSCEs are identified for the Indian apparel industries through an extant literature review and validated using the Delphi method by seeking experts' opinions. The identified CSCEs are subjected to a novel neutrosophic interpretive structural modeling (N-ISM) method to capture the interrelationships between CSCEs and compute the driving and dependence power of CSCEs.

The findings of the present research work revealed that “supportive legislative framework, awareness of circular economy's potential for revenue gain and availability of trained research and development (R&D) team” are the critical CSCEs that need to be considered while implementing a circular supply chain in apparel industries.

This study offers insightful implications to guide practitioners in implementing the circular economy in apparel supply chains.

This research work is one of the earlier studies to analyze the enablers for implementing circular supply chains. This study has explored CSCEs in the context of apparel industries. From a methodological perspective, the novel N-ISM method is worth highlighting as the originality of the work.

Used clothes supply chains are becoming increasingly complex, fragmented and less transparent due to rising volumes of discarded clothes and its dispersed reverse logistics operations across the Global North (GN) and Global South (GS). While it has a promising impact on circular economy and international trade growth, increasing exports of used clothes and overflowing landfills raise some negative concerns on its overall sustainability. This paper addresses the dichotomy that exists in terms of interpreting the sustainability credentials of used clothes supply chains.

A systematic literature review was carried out and 55 articles were examined to identify the triple bottom line (TBL) sustainability impacts of used clothes supply chains. TBL sustainability issues were identified, reflected through the lens of natural resource-based view and interpreted in the form of propositions.

The paper pinpoints seven TBL sustainability concerns and prescribes three sets of strategic resources required in glocal used clothes supply chains for mitigating these. These are (1) slowing the supply chain by tackling poor quality, overproduction and oversupply issues, (2) improving logistics/supply chain infrastructure and ecosystem collaboration and (2) embedding transparent environmental, social and governance (ESG) measures taken by both value chain actors and regulatory bodies, for embracing system-level sustainable development.

This is one of the first studies to analyse TBL sustainability of glocal north–south used clothes supply chains. The study is unique in terms of its scope and contribution to the sustainable supply chain literature.

The purpose of this paper is to identify opportunities and challenges for small- to medium-sized pre-owned fashion enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam. While recent studies have identified the growth of pre-owned fashion in developed economies, pre-owned clothing remains negatively associated by some consumers with overseas charity donations of second-hand clothes to Vietnam, following the economic upheaval of the 1980s.

Qualitative data were collected via semi-structured in-depth interviews with founders and/or owners of pre-owned fashion SMEs (n = 5, aged 25–40 years) with physical stores located in Ho Chi Minh City alongside online retail platforms. All interviewees are significant industry and consumer influencers.

Younger Vietnamese consumers are motivated by (1) pre-owned fashion's value for money compared to buying new western branded luxury items and (2) the ability of pre-owned and vintage fashion to allow the wearer to create a unique personal style. While Vietnamese consumers and retailers associate “sustainable fashion” with various, often unrelated concepts, the impact of global and local discourse around sustainable fashion in the last five years has generally supported wider interest in pre-owned fashion.

This study contributes to the relatively modest pool of English-language research on the fashion and textiles industry in Vietnam, a global fast-fashion manufacturing hub. The findings advance understanding of how pre-owned fashion is growing as a high-end niche market despite significant supply chain restrictions as well as a lingering perception of pre-owned fashion as charitable donations.

This study proposes a garment modularization model based on an interactive genetic algorithm. The suggested model consists of extraction and identification of parts and the determination and implementation of connections. Rules and corresponding mathematical equations have been formulated for the part's extractions from the discarded products and connections for the redesigned products.

Sustainability entices scholars and practitioners while referring to reducing waste to control environmental degradation. One of the ways to safeguard natural resources is to increase the reuse of old or discarded products. The current study focuses on the redesign process to improve the reuse of products.

The intelligent system proposed based on the modularization techniques is expected to simplify and quantify the redesign process. The model can further help in the minimization of wastage and environmental degradation.

Presently, manual decisions are taken by the designers based on their memory, experience and intuition to extract and join the parts.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic's economic effects, this paper focuses on how home-based women artisans running their family businesses plan their operations to function in the “new normal” environment. The paper emphasises the adaptability and reorientation of business strategies displayed by women entrepreneurs in response to the changing work environment. The paper argues that the women's sense of agency after years of running the family business enables them to bargain and offer passive resistance to the family's power, with the latter aiming to curtail their entrepreneurial gains as the men return to their homes after losing their jobs with the onset of the pandemic.

The research draws from a qualitative study that was conducted employing field surveys and in-depth interviews with the women entrepreneurs in four important handloom clusters in Nadia, West Bengal (India) in 2022. The empirical evidence is gathered from five months of extensive ethnographic study with 66 home-based women entrepreneurs belonging to 26 handloom family enterprises. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews and the following narrative analysis have been used to comprehend the complex and dynamic conception of female entrepreneurship and women's agency to pivot business strategies during the economic turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result of the abrupt suspension of the textile industry and the partial or total closure of the traditional and contemporary markets due to the COVID-19 pandemic, women from family handloom enterprises are taking steps to strengthen their entrepreneurial resistance. Although women entrepreneurs had spent years running the family business in the absence of their husbands, the pandemic exacerbated the deep-seated gender disparities within the family when social norms threatened to undo the hard-won progress made by them. However, their sense of agency enables them to plan well and resist the patriarchal onslaught with a variety of potentials, utilising tools of active and/or passive resistance within an environment of concrete limits and oppressions.

The paper contributes to the literature on women's entrepreneurial capacity by focusing on how the COVID-19 crisis and changing market demands enable gendered reactions in family enterprises. While men, back home after losing their jobs, choose to strengthen their individual identities and power positions by trying to retain control over the family business, women contribute to collective actions for enhancing the resilience of the community by pivoting their business strategies and implementing new ideas to suit new market conditions. Women thus play a central role in fostering social cohesion, helping build and maintain relationships, promoting empathy, and creating a sense of belonging, which strengthen community bonds and cooperation. The paper shows how women's entrepreneurial resilience and responsibility provide an important basis for organizing sustainable collective action for the survival of the artisanal community during crisis situations.

Idea of circular economy defies the classical “make-use-dispose” approach of linear economic model. In the context of health-care industry, it relies heavily on the supply chain practices implemented by industry stakeholders. The purpose of this study is to explore such relationships, study their structure and put it across for attaining sustainability at large.

This study is an empirical research conducted on 145 health-care firms. The collected data is analysed to develop structural and measurement model. The five constructed hypotheses are examined and tested through structural equation modelling.

The study illustrates the latent relationships that exist among the stakeholders involvement, sustainable supply chain practices, sustainable performance and circular economy for health-care industry. It is found that the adoption of sustainable supply chain practices improves health-care performance, which, in turn, have positive influence on circular economy.

The structural and measurement model is developed in the context of circular health-care economy. It can be validated or improvised by conducting similar research in other industry using different methods. This research work fulfils the long existing gap in research by offering a linkage between various constructs to achieve health-care circular economy. Based on the research results, future researchers can build theories of circular economy and sustainability for health-care industry.

The study attempts to study the supply chain ways to achieve circular economy for Indian health-care sector. It considered latent relationships among the set of constructs, which are needed for theory building at later stage.

Apparel manufacturers' achievement of green manufacturing (GM) goal remains low. This paper aims to identify and prioritise the barriers to GM implementation in apparel companies.

First, an extensive literature review is conducted to identify the key barriers to GM implementation. Second, 374 usable questionnaires are collected from apparel manufacturing companies to (a) examine the impact of and (b) rank the barriers. Third, interpretive structural modelling (ISM) is applied to test the relationships among barriers. Finally, structural equation modelling (SEM) is applied to improve the model derived from the ISM.

The results reveal that the independent barriers – lack of eco-literacy among upstream or downstream supply chain members, lack of specific company-level training and monitoring of the progress of GM implementation and inadequate support from regulatory authorities – are the root causes of all the barriers. These three barriers are also at a low level of the ISM model, indicating that they significantly affect the entire system and therefore should be accorded the highest priority in dealing with these barriers.

The results are useful for decision-makers and apparel companies to understand identified barriers, develop potential GM interventions and formulate appropriate strategies to overcome these barriers.

The listed barriers are yet to be comprehensively synthesised in a coherent model and empirically tested in the apparel sector using a combination of the ISM and SEM techniques. The empirically validated model presented in this study is an important step in that direction.

The objective of this paper is to synthesise the published literature on consumer awareness and acceptance of Sustainable Fashion (SF) and highlight that sustainability decisions taken across procurement, designing, manufacturing and retailing must include the consumer perspective of SF.

Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on sustainable fashion combined with consumer behavior was conducted. The study approach involved descriptive analysis, content analysis and theoretical analysis in the first section. The later sections focus on sustainability practices across the apparel supply chain that can foster acceptance of sustainable fashion.

In this review paper, five solutions that are typically used for leveraging consumer awareness and acceptance towards sustainable fashion are identified from the latest research papers: (1) attention to micro-sensitive factors (2) shared responsibilities (3) repositioning sustainable fashion for larger audience (4) positioning conscious fashion and (5) unified approach. These solutions are proposed as most important for achieving success in sustainable production and sustainable consumption (SPSC) for the fashion industry. Further, suggestions for how to embed sustainability related business decisions across sourcing, designing, manufacturing, distribution and recollection and retailing are also provided.

Through this research, a clear view emerges of the progression of publication and where future research should be directed to popularise sustainable fashion among consumers. Research findings and proposed solutions will be valuable inputs for brand managers, marketers and retailers as they conceive new plans and make decisions about addressing sustainability challenges in textile and apparel manufacturing firms.

This is a first of its kind of study on sustainable fashion that highlights the importance of understanding consumer behaviour in influencing sustainability decisions required across sourcing, designing, manufacturing and retailing to achieve substantial economic advantages in the fashion industry. End-to-end supply chain processes (i.e. procurement, design, manufacturing, marketing and retailing) are considered to identify several factors that influence consumer behavior in favor of sustainable fashion throughout the supply chain.

In recent years, researchers and practitioners have paid a great deal of attention to the circular economy (CE) due to its potential social and environmental benefits. However, limited attention has been devoted in the literature to studying the barriers to CE implementation in the apparel retail industry in emerging and developing nations besides China. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the barriers to implementing CE in the Indian garment retail market.

This exploratory study uses a comprehensive literature analysis to identify the micro-level impediments to CE adoption in India's garment retail industry. The study aims to identify these barriers using a Delphi process, consisting of three stages. The first stage involves literature reviews and expert opinions, while the second and third stages involve survey methods with 14 industry professionals and academics. The use of the two primary data sources allows for triangulation of the data, which improves the validity of the findings and enables broader conclusions to be drawn from the results.

This study indicates that the top three challenges to implementing CE principles in the Indian apparel retail industry are “standards and regulation barriers” (84%), “strategic barriers” (82%) and “supply chain management and technology barriers” (79%). Strategies for overcoming these obstacles include gaining top management support, coordinating supply chain components, training and employee motivation.

This study considers only Indian apparel retail industry, and the practical implications could potentially limit the study to emerging Asian economies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research of its type to explore CE obstacles at the organizational level in the Indian garment retail business. Thus, it contributes to a greater understanding of the topic and enables practitioners to develop effective policies and business strategies for CE and sustainability.

Companies with corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices care about customers, society, the environment and workers. This study aims to examine the impact of CSR practices (i.e. economic CSR, environmental CSR and societal CSR) on consumers’ purchase intention of apparel products, with the mediating role of consumer-retailer love on this relationship.

Data gathered using purposive sampling technique from 300 young online consumers using purposive sampling were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling via SmartPLS3.0.

The results reveal that CSR practices (i.e. environmental CSR and societal CSR) have a positive influence on purchase intention for apparel products. Moreover, consumer-retailer love mediates the relationship between CSR practices (i.e. economic CSR and environmental CSR) and consumers’ purchase intention for apparel products.

Apparel retail marketers should focus on key determinants when designing CSR campaigns and communicating these CSR initiatives in social media and annual reports. They should also focus on their service quality to create a good perception (images) that helps measure the emotional response (love) between the retailer and consumers.

By applying the triple bottom line framework and the stimulus-organism-response model in a single framework, this study is unique and highlights the role of consumer-retailer love as an important mediator on the impact between CSR practices (i.e. economic CSR, environmental CSR, societal CSR) and consumers’ purchase intention of apparel products. The findings represent a new contribution to the existing literature, as there has been very limited research on this relationship in a developing nation context.