Fashion Supply Chain: a literature review to define the trends of research (2012-2019)

Due to the high challenges to face and the current market evolution towards an ever faster fashion, the fashion supply chain has been the subject of several studies proposed in literature, with different facets and topics treated. In order to identify the main trends and issues of research, since the aspects at stake are several and different, the aim of this study is to present results from a literature review carried out in 118 scientific papers published between 2012 and 2019 resulting from a very simple query with a unique search term: “fashion supply chain”. Descriptive statistics (i.e. year of publication and country of the study) and qualitative aspects (i.e. category of topic and keywords’ analysis) were investigated. Sustainability, as well as the development of models aiming at different optimizations methods and the implementation of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tools turned out to be much debated within the field in question, whilst enabling technologies resulting from the Industry 4.0 paradigm appear as less common, probably due to the time span under investigation.