Elements, chromatic tones and visual strategies of sustainable fashion brand posts on Instagram

Social media networks, especially those where the use of images plays a key role, are a fundamental tool for fashion brands to be perceived as sustainable. The purpose of the present investigation is to analyze the elements and colors used by the 10 fashion corporations with the highest scores in the sustainability rankings when they share photographs and illustrations to Instagram and analyze the differences between publications related to sustainability and those that are not. Based on the history of posts from the 61 brands that make up these 10 corporations (277,955), those that include a term related to sustainability were identified, obtaining a sample of 12,639 publications. Next, an automatized image recognition was made using the Python Inception V3 library and the colors used were analyzed using the PIL and colorsys libraries. Even though clothing and footwear are the elements most frequently displayed when choosing a single image, in half of the cases the brands combine various types of images to reinforce the sustainable message with images of nature, sport, animals or food. In sustainable content, this trend is more pronounced in a communication strategy aimed at reducing the prominence of the final article, subjected to an industrial manufacturing process, and providing a more benevolent context from the point of view of sustainability. In addition, there are chromatic differences between sustainable content and those that are not. In all cases, the most used color is red, but in sustainable content the presence of cyan and green increases, closely linked to images of nature and landscapes.