In 1975, Amancio Ortega opened a small boutique baptized Zara. His idea was revolutionary: shorten fashion cycles to permanently offer new clothes at affordable prices. This strategy was based in the 1990s on a massive relocation of production to Asia, with the only compression of costs.
The principle is simple: producing quickly, a lot, and often. Collections renewed every 4 to 6 weeks, adapting in real time to trends. Competiting brands and large distribution quickly embraced this logic. Result: in fifty years, fast fashion has turned our consumption habits upset, encouraging the compulsive purchase of clothing often worn once or twice, rarely more.
The consequences are colossal. The textile industry is responsible for around 10 % of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the UN, almost 20 % of industrial water pollution, and an exponential quantity of waste. Each second, the equivalent of a textile truck is buried or cremated, depending on the Ellen MacArthur foundation. The sustainability of the clothes falls, the unsold people are piling up, the second -hand resale circuits struggle to absorb this mountain of surplus.
“An economic, social and environmental mess”
Fast Fashion has imposed an industrial logic of overproduction disconnected from real needs. And this waste, on all floors – economic, social, environmental – is today documented, measured, but largely tolerated.
Chinese platforms: always faster
Since 2020, a new generation of players – mainly Chinese – has established itself on the world market. Shein, Temu, and to a lesser extent Aliexpress, did not simply resume the recipes of Fast Fashion: they adapted them to the digital age.
Thanks to artificial intelligence and a massive collection of customer data, these platforms publish thousands of new products every day, most of which are only manufactured in very small series. Only articles that immediately encounter significant demand are produced on a large scale. This iterative micro-production system limits stocks, unsold, but at the cost of an industrial rate that exhausts subcontracting chains.
Shein can sell a dress at € 6, a € 3 t-shirt, a pair of shoes for less than € 10. Prices made possible by degraded working conditions, especially in China and Bangladesh. However, these new giants are not necessarily the biggest polluters. In volume of products produced, Shein is still far from historic behemoths. Their carbon footprint is real, but reported to their market share, it remains proportionally lower than that of textile mass distribution giants, which continue to deliver tens of millions of parts each month, often from synthetic materials.
A law that exempts the largest polluters
It is in this context that France attempted, in 2024, to regain control with a bill aimed at supervising the ultra fast fashion. Voted unanimously in the National Assembly, the first version of the text intended to prohibit advertising for brands of Fast Fashion, establish a progressive ecological penalty on the products sold, and impose new rules of transparency on the volumes produced.
“This law reflects a form of political cynicism”
But during his visit to the Senate, the text was emptied of its substance. The most structuring provisions have been dismissed. From now on, only ultra low-cost platforms from China are targeted-Shein and Temu, mainly. Large European and French distributors are completely exempt.
The absurdity of this orientation is obvious: it is precisely these actors, well installed in the economic landscape, which dominate the market in volumes, pollution, and in incitement to overconsumption. Malus, advertising restrictions, transparency obligations? Reserved for ” others “.
This selective targeting that poses a problem
First, it seriously weakens the environmental efficiency of the text. Regulating the only new entrants-even if they are ultra -rapid-while leaving carte blanche to historical polluters, amounts to transforming a structuring measure into a simple political gesture. A sword in the water, or worse: an implicit permit to pollute for distributors already installed.
Then, this law reflects a form of political cynicism. As the electoral deadlines approaches, it allows the majority to check the ecological box without angering the giants of the sector, nor take the risk of a major commercial conflict with Spain or Sweden. It gives a bone to consume the activists, without tackling the root of the problem.
Finally, it penalizes, once again, the most modest consumers. Because they are the ones who buy on Shein, Temu or Aliexpress. Not by taste for disposable fashion, but for lack of viable economic alternatives. However, if an ecological taxation is necessary, it must be fair, fair, and accompanied by solutions: support for the sustainable fashion sector, enlargement of the second -hand offer, financing of a textile instructions. None of this appears in the current text.
A missed opportunity
At a time when the 50th anniversary of Fast Fashion is celebrated, a strong signal would have needed. Not a cosmetic maneuver. Fast Fashion does not come down to Shein, any more than it started in 2020. It is a system, an industrial logic that we have left prospering for five decades. As it stands, the French law on fast fashion appears as an incomplete, partial, and disconnected measure from the reality of the market.
The environmental challenge is immense. It demands to get out of the announcements to think a real reform of the textile sector, targeting all of its actors, without exception. Otherwise, mismanagement will continue. With, as a bonus, bad conscience in standard.
*Loïc Rousselle is a professor of physics and national spokesperson for the ecology party at the center.
