Communicating Social Equity and Environmental Protection on the Corporate Websites of Gap Inc. and House of Hermès

This paper looks into the impact that business model, history and corporate culture might have on sustainability communication (Dunphy et al. 2000) and transparency (Wehmeier 2018; Rawlins 2009; Graafland and Nihof 2007; Graafland et al. 2004) in the fashion industry (Koskela and Crawford Camiciottoli 2020). The aim of this study is to identify (dis)similarities in selecting, presenting and communicating online contents about corporate sustainability on Gap Inc.’s international corporate website and House of Hermès, or Hermès International A.S.’s e-commerce and corporate website. In their sectors and segments (middle-mass/trendy vs. old luxury-super-premium/classic) Gap Inc. and Hermès are among the relatively high scoring companies on the Fashion Transparency Index 2020 (FTI 2020); the former is based in the USA, the latter in France. Whereas the analysis is embedded in the context of current discussion on organizational and communication transparency in business settings, we set the groundwork for a unified account of transparency in corporate website communication. Accordingly, we bring together insights from discourse studies, the tools of corpus linguistics for the digital written text around sustainability and related words in the domains of social equity and environmental protection on the one hand, and insights from research in webpage usability (Nielsen-Norman group) and multimodal studies (Bateman 2014) for content- and interface-design features, layout and text-image meaning co-construction on the other.