French lawmakers vote to slow down fast fashion with penalties
French lawmakers vote to slow down fast fashion with penalties
France’s parliament on Thursday backed a string of measures making low-cost fast fashion, especially from Chinese mass producers, less attractive to buyers.
France’s parliament on Thursday backed a string of measures making low-cost fast fashion, especially from Chinese mass producers, less attractive to buyers.
Good idea. I wonder if the implementation works correctly though:
A surcharge linked to fast fashion’s ecological footprint of five euros ($5.45) per item is planned from next year, rising to 10 euros by 2030. The charge cannot, however, exceed 50 percent of an item’s price tag.
So the 1€ shirt from Shein is going to cost 1.5€? That's not going to have much effect when sustainable shirts start around 15€.
I also guess Chinese marketplaces may still evade the law by hiding behind exaggerated shipping costs or maybe even splitting up into multiple entities with a lower release cadence. Afaics, people already buy clothing from sketchy, Tiktok-advertised Shopify sites.
I still don't understand how this would work - everything is staying the same production wise, workers are payed poorly, unsafe conditions, but the product will cost more? And then customers will pay more for their clothings and that will be used to push other, more sustainable manufacturers?
That is my understanding as well, yes.
I think there's some rhyme and reason to it: France has limited insight into random manufacturing operations somewhere in Asia, so it can't directly regulate there. That's especially true if the clothing is sold by a Chinese platform as well which I don't expect to care much about the EU supply chain regulation either.
European countries may not be perfect, but they do seem to have working governments that produce legislation not 110% beholden to economic interest of corporations
that produce legislation not 110% beholden to economic interest of corporations
France has a massive Fashion industry with Bernard Arnault competing for the richest person on the planet position. But even a brand like Kenzo is far from being fash fashion (Just checked on Zalando, kids T-shirt at 100 EUR, no wonder why the owner is so rich) so it's not hindering the biggest French corpo.
I see... Always a dark side to all stories, eh?
I guess we can only hope that government get something right while they go on their normal business of being in corporation's pockets
Bernard Arnault is lobbying against this law, because his companies make a lot of money in the Asian market, especially in China, and he fears repercussions from the Chinese government and a tariff war.
Ever since I misheard someone as saying that "fashion is going out of fashion" I keep waiting for it to happen.
I bet my remaining testicle that they’ve been saying that since the dawn of fashion
Protectionism makes us all poorer in the long run.
Free markets make free people.
Free people as in free from exploitation, free from polluted environments, free from unsafe work conditions? Then I'm with you.
Indeed, I'm all for free markets as long as there's a level playing field.