Wardrobe Wars: Why is France going after ultrafast fashion giants Shein, Temu?

France is the fashion capital. Paris is the birthplace of uber-luxury boutiques – Louis Vuitton, Chanel and whatnot. So why is the nation bothered by fast-fashion brands like Shein and Temu? The answer is not competition alone. But also the damage these products cause to the environment.

What is France’s fast fashion bill?

France is one of the first countries in the world to target the influx of low-cost, mass-produced garments predominantly from China. Last week, its lower house of parliament approved a bill, seeking penalties on ultrafast fashion products aimed at helping to offset their environmental impact.

Lawmakers last Thursday unanimously approved the bill, greenlighting it for the Senate to consider — either to approve or tweak it and send it back to the lower house — before it can become law.

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The bill calls for gradually increasing penalties of up to 10 euros (Rs 900) per individual item of clothing by 2030 and a ban on advertising for such products. It would make it mandatory that fast fashion retailers include an item’s reuse, repair, recycling and environmental impact near the product’s price.

Christophe Bechu, the minister for ecological transition, hailed the vote as a historic step toward reining in the “excesses” of fast fashion. The bill will introduce stringent measures, including banning advertising for the most inexpensive textiles and imposing an environmental levy on these low-cost products, reports The Associated Press (AP).

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The bill specifically targets fast fashion giants, calling for companies to disclose their products’ environmental impact. This move seeks to pivot the industry toward more sustainable practices, encouraging transparency and accountability.

It is seen as a crackdown on emerging fashion powerhouses like China’s Shein and Temu .

What is fast fashion?

Fast fashion refers to clothes produced rapidly to follow current trends in the industry and sold at cheap prices. They are often considered low in quality. In the 1990s, Spanish retailer Zara was one the first fast fashion companies, putting out hundreds of items every week. The term was coined by The New York Times when the brand landed in the city and announced that it would take 15 days for a garment to go from being designed to sold.

It was somewhere in the late 2000s that fast fashion brands caught on, selling everything from jeans to work attire at significantly lower prices than then-established stores like Levis or Gap.

Fast fashion retailers move swifter than their traditional counterparts. They compress production cycles and turn out the latest designs. Apart from being cheaper, these brands have many takers as they enable shoppers to expand their wardrobe and refresh it.

While Shein and Temu are relatively new entrants, they have created a new segment – ultrafast fashion. They move swifter than their other counterparts.

According to a recent “The State of Fashion 2024 report”, published by Business of Fashion and McKinsey, Singapore-headquartered Shein consistently churned out up to 10,000 new designs a day as of 2023. Its products are, on average, significantly less expensive relative to its rivals: Shein’s average SKU [stock keeping unit] price is $14 (Rs 1,164), compared with $26 (Rs 2,161) at H&M and $34 (Rs 2,826) at Zara.

Also read: Explained: A look at Shein's meteoric rise

But this business of fast fashion comes at a larger cost. Several speedy retailers depend on unpaid labour from factory employees with poor working conditions.

A US Congressional report published last year offered a blistering critique of Temu. “American consumers should know that there is an extremely high risk that Temu’s supply chains are contaminated with forced labour,” the report said. However, the company has said that it strictly prohibits the use of forced or child labour.

In 2021, a report by Swiss advocacy group, Public Eye, found that several Shein employees across six sites in China’s Guangzhou were found to be working 75-hour weeks.

There is also a big concern about fast fashion and its impact on the environment.

How fast fashion hurts the environment

In the age of fast and ultrafast fashion, we are buying more clothes than ever before – 60 per cent more, according to a 2022 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report. We are wearing them for less time and discarding them fast.

There is no pausing this trend. The sale of clothes globally could increase by 65 per cent by 2030, the World Bank estimates. It might not be pinching our pockets but it is fuelling a climate crisis.

Producing clothes uses a lot of natural resources and creates greenhouse emissions leading to climate change. Clothes production processes such as dying require 43 million tonnes of chemicals a year and synthetic materials like polyester require an estimated 342 million barrels of oil annually. Washing clothes releases 500,000 tons of microfibres into the ocean annually, the equivalent of 50 billion plastics.

The fashion industry is among the world’s biggest producers of greenhouse gas emissions. It is responsible for eight to 10 per cent of global emissions, according to the United Nations, more than aviation and shipping combined, reports the BBC.

The Ellen Macarthur Foundation, a UNEP partner, has estimated that a truckload of abandoned textiles is dumped in a landfill or incinerated every second.

Also read: Retail Wars: Why Shein has been accused of ‘mafia-style intimidation’ by rival Temu

These statistics apply to the entire industry but Shein, one of the most googled clothing brands, is a big contributor to the climate crisis.

The astonishing number of items it produces every day makes it highly unsustainable. The manufacturers’ rapid use of virgin polyester and large consumption of oil churns out the same amount of CO2 as approximately 180 coal-fired power plants, TIME reports quoting Synthetics Anonymous 2.0, a paper published on fashion sustainability.

The company releases about 6.3 million tons of carbon dioxide a year in its trail, a number that falls well below the 45 per cent target to reduce global carbon emissions by 2030, which the UN has said is necessary for fashion companies to implement to help limit global warming.

Does fast fashion hurt France’s fashion business?

The popularity of fashion retailers Shein and Temu, which scale up orders based on demand thanks to ultra-flexible supply chains, has disrupted the retail sector.

France has seen its lower-end market sectors suffer due to stiff competition from fast fashion retailers like Zara, H&M, and China’s Shein and Temu.

According to “The State of Fashion 2024” report, 40 per cent of US consumers and 26 per cent of UK consumers have shopped Shein or Temu in the past 12 months. If you include other fast fashion retailers, the number would likely be much larger.

By imposing these measures, France aims to level the playing field and promote a more sustainable fashion landscape.

But France is not alone. In the US, two landmark bills aiming at the industry’s environmental and social impact — the New York Fashion Act and the Fashion Workers Act — are back on the state’s legislative agenda.

What do Shein and Temu have to say?

Shein said in a statement to Reuters that the clothes it produces meet an existing demand, which allows its rate of unsold garments to remain consistently in low single digits, whereas traditional players can have up to 40 per cent waste. This, they claim, contributes to reducing waste, a crucial aspect of sustainability in fashion.

Luxury giants such as Louis Vitton and Kering regularly face criticism for the billions of dollars of unsold inventory yearly.

Shein also told the BBC that the impact of France’s bill will “worsen the purchasing power of French consumers, at a time when they are already feeling the impact of the cost-of-living crisis.”

Temu told the publication that they do not operate as a fast fashion company because they are a marketplace and do not manufacture their own products.

Will a law to regulate the fashion world work?

Amid a divide in the fashion industry, is regulation the only way forward?

Kathleen Talbot, chief sustainability officer and vice president of operations at Reformation, is quoted as saying by the BBC that using regulation as a vehicle to drive change may be the only option, as slowing overconsumption seems unlikely in a market with a piping-hot demand that isn’t simmering down.

But not everyone agrees. Many experts believe the bill is France’s attempt to save its fashion industry. It presents a useful vehicle to fulfil France’s goal of shielding its storied domestic market against the rise of fast fashion giants, including high-growth challengers like Shein, Neil Saunders, managing director of retail for GlobalData, told Vogue Business.

With inputs from agencies