Unraveling the Environmental Impacts of the Fashion Industry: A Fourier-Based Analysis of Pollution Dynamics and Causality Across Five Countries

The fashion industry, which stands out for its creativity and dynamism, has multidimensional impacts in terms of environmental sustainability from raw material extraction to waste management. The textile and fashion industries are criticized for posing significant threats to the ecosystem, biodiversity, and human health by negatively impacting air, water, and soil quality throughout the cycle, from production and distribution to consumption and disposal. By focusing on five emerging economies among the top ten textile exporters, this study focuses on an empirical examination of the nexus between the fashion and textile industry, energy consumption, economic growth, and carbon dioxide emissions. This study fills the existing quantitative research gap in the fashion sector. It provides a comprehensive review that analyzes the environmental impacts in the sector to adopt more sustainable and effective policies. After acknowledging the structural breaks in the sample covering 1980–2023, novel Fourier bootstrapping ARDL and Fourier Granger Causality methods are adopted to examine the long- and short-run interconnections and the directions of causality in a comparative setting for China, Türkiye, India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. The results confirmed the positive effects of textiles and fashion as well as energy consumption and economic growth with varying magnitudes for the countries examined. The causality tests confirmed varying and complex unidirectional and bidirectional causality and feedback effects among the variables examined depending on the country analyzed, in addition to identifying common causal effects from textile and fashion to environmental degradation. The findings are of great importance and have significant policy implications.