Notes on Ephemeral Fashion

France is the first country to make an effort to ban fast fashion. Will regulation finally yield real-world results?

Famous for its luxury brands, it’s not surprising that France is the first country in the world attempting to ban, or at least severely limit, fast fashion. After all, France already has, what some might call, “draconian” laws on the books against counterfeit items. (In France, you can be fined or charged with a criminal offense for possessing an LV knockoff.) If like me, you’re curious as to what France’s historic bill really calls for and what its implications for French society might be, what with the French’s often imitated and even more duplicated styles, join me in this brief but relatively deep dive into the story!

At an Earth Month media event for Terracycle last week, standing on the 2020 Olympic podium made of recycled plastic, wearing a secondhand Louis Vuitton bag from Greene Street, thrifted Ba&Sh pants from ThredUp, Manolo Blahnik flats from The Real Real, and a new Stories corset.

Here’s the basic gist: last month, France’s lower house voted to ban fast fashion advertising and put a 5 euro tax on overproduced items. Essentially, France is trying to protect their own textile industry and the environment by “legislating to limit the excesses of ultra fast fashion”, according to Christophe Béchu, minister for ecological transition. (Keep in mind, the measures still require a vote in the Senate.)

There’s already a lot here, and, if you’re all or mostly American like me, you might not even realize that France has a minister for the environment or has had one since the 1970s. The position was renamed several times and “sustainability” was added to the mix in 2002, so that now Béchu has a badass-sounding, action-oriented title like “minister for ecological transition”.

While, the U.S. does have a climate czar, or a special envoy to the president, that position just doesn’t hold the same policy-wielding gravitas as, say, a secretary of climate change or a minister of sustainability would. For example, John Podesta, who currently holds the special envoy position, can advise President Biden on how to disburse clean energy tax credits, but it’s hard to imagine him crafting or presenting a bill before congress as Christophe Béchu essentially did before the French lower house.

Interestingly, this anti-fast fashion bill was first launched by a conservative, not progressive, lawmaker. That holds profound implications for mapping how real policy change could be enacted elsewhere. In this case, conservative lawmaker Antoine Vermorel-Marques aimed to craft a bill to help France’s ailing textile market, but since then the language of the bill has become explicitly more environmental, although some more progressive aspects of the bill introduced by the Green Party, like actual penalties for fast fashion producers or criteria for workplace conditions, were struck down. According to the Guardian, “Key measures [of the bill do] include a ban on advertising for the cheapest textiles, and an environmental charge on low-cost items.”

Even with most of those progressive changes intact, the bill has proved popular across the aisle and won unanimous approval in the lower house of the French Parliament, which, again, as an American in this current political climate, is the most jaw-dropping aspect of this whole shebang.

Can you imagine Chuck Schumer and Mike Johnson agreeing on anything, let alone a progressive climate change bill? I mean, Johnson literally praised EIGHTEENTH CENTURY VALUES in one of his speeches.

It’s also probably embarrassingly naive, but I can’t help but wonder if an anti-fast fashion bill first crafted to protect American brands and not with an explicitly environmental message could also gain a foothold in the U.S.? Maybe, “America first” language might prove popular with Republican constituents and that might allow legislators to later tack on climate change language… and this imaginative exercise is giving me a headache. I can’t even picture how to finish a sentence mixing America first rhetoric with climate change policy coherently except maybe to point out climate change adversely affects the poor and most Republicans are not the embarrassed millionaires they’d like to imagine themselves to be, so maybe they should vote in their own self-interests and … yeah, we already know how that story ends. Le sigh.

Let’s focus on France where good things are actually happening then, shall we? The implications of this bill’s popularity means other measures could be tackled; the French environmental ministry said it would also propose a European Union ban on exports of used clothes. (Basically, a related bid to combat the worsening problem of textile waste.)

Some detractors do exist, who say the 5 euro (and by 2030 up to10 euro) tariff on items produced by fast fashion behemoths penalizes the poor. There’s an argument to be made that fast fashion makes fashionable clothing affordable to all. However, how much clothing do we all really need?

There are enough clothes on the planet right now to dress the next six generations of the human race. Plus, fast fashion prices have reached such lows I don’t really think 5 or even 10 euros will truly make a dent in anyone’s wallet let alone penalize the brands responsible. We can all agree it would be gratifying to never again see insulting prices like bathing suits for $1 or campaigns like Temu’s recent promotion of $0 faux-fur boots. I don’t think anyone could argue that ZERO DOLLARS is in any way shape or form a sane, fair price reflective of decent working conditions or of anything but demonic greed and overproduction.

France has also addressed some of those criticisms with an excitingly retrograde yet also progressive repair scheme that promises to reimburse shoppers up to 25 euros when they repair old items.

Most of all, out of all of this, I love the implications of a regulated, society-wide mindset shift. I know that’s one reason I’m going to be following this story very closely myself.

I also love fashionable clothing and don’t want to legislate anyone else’s style, but cheap fast fashion has become SO overproduced and SO cheap that something must be done to stem the tide. Environmental degradation and carbon emissions have made fashion one of the most polluting industries, and that’s without taking the human toll into consideration. Without regulation, these ultra fast fashion producers will only continue metastasizing. Shein now produces 35,000 to 100,000 garments a day. What will our planet look like if they are not stymied or, worse, a competitor like Temu comes along who could potentially produce 200,000? Or then 400,000?

As attractive as cheap, affordable fashion can be, I’d rather have a planet to live on than feed my planet into the fast fashion maw and, really, is paying $5 for faux-fur boots instead of zero such a hardship? Things have gotten that bad. It’s nice to see a country doing something to regulate fast fashion, but I don’t think 5 euros is going to be enough. The ban on fast fashion advertising might have more effect. However, I wonder what that ban will mean? No more subway ads or no more le Zara ‘auls on le Instagram or le Tik Tok?

What do you think of France’s fast fashion ban? Do you think anything similar could happen in the U.S.?

*A note: although I am a French-American dual citizen, a lot of this is new to me, including the ins and outs of France’s legislative process, so if I got any of this wrong, let me know in the comments!