Global industries are typically dominated by a few disproportionately large and influential transnational corporations, or keystone actors. While concentration of economic production is not a new phenomenon, in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world, the scale of the impacts of keystone actors on diverse social-ecological systems continues to grow. In this article, we investigate how keystone actors in the global clothing industry engage in collaboration with a variety of other organizations to address nine interrelated biophysical and socioeconomic sustainability challenges. We expand on previous theoretical and empirical research by focusing on the larger business ecosystem in which keystone actors are embedded, and use network analysis to assess the contributions of different actor types to the architecture of the ecosystem. This systemic approach to the study of keystone actors and sustainability challenges highlights an important source of influence largely not addressed in previous research: the presence of organizations that occupy strategic positions around keystone actors. Such knowledge can help identify governance strategies for advancing industry-wide transformation towards sustainability.

The fashion and textiles industry, and policymakers at all levels, are showing an increased interest in the concept of circular economy as a way to decrease business risks and negative environmental impacts. However, focus is placed mainly on the material ‘stuff’ of textile fashion and its biophysical harms. The current material focus has several shortcomings, because fashion is a social-ecological system and cannot be understood merely by addressing its environmental dimensions. In this paper, we rethink the fashion system from a critical social-ecological perspective. The driver-state-response framework shows social drivers and ecological impacts as an adaptive social-ecological system, exposing how these interacting aspects need to be addressed for sustainable and resilient implementation of circular economy. We show how current responses to global sustainability challenges have so far fallen short. Our overall aim is to expand possibilities for reframing responses that better reflect the complex links between the global fashion system, culture and creativity and the dynamics of the living planet. We argue that reducing planetary pressure from the global fashion and textiles industry requires greater recognition of the system’s social drivers with more emphasis on the many cross-scale links between social and ecological dimensions. Resilient decisions aiming for sustainable circularity of the fashion industry must therefore pay attention to social activities beyond the industry value chain, not just material flows within it.