Top 3 most ironic things: France telling people to stop buying clothes. This is the country that gave us Paris Fashion Week, haute couture, Met Gala and our favourite scenes in Der Teufel trägt Prada (2006), hello?! Now France is taking aim at an industry built around making sure we never feel really caught up. Well, part of it. Because from September, a new law starts making what France officially calls „ultra-fast fashion” less attractive. And that tiny word „ultra” is where things get interesting.
So what does the law actually do? From September, ultra-fast-fashion companies can face higher environmental charges on every item they sell. As an addition, at the beginning of next year advertising and influencer promotion for ultra-fast fashion will be banned too. Well, that’s a pretty big deal when an entire shopping culture lives on our feeds. So yes, your next Temu or Shein haul might soon become a little harder to sell to a French audience. Oops.
And honestly, that sounds like a pretty good thing. We all know those annoying collab videos. Someone empties a package containing 23 tops onto their bed, tries each one on for twelve seconds and tells us which ones are „giving”. Then another parcel arrives. And another. Besides being ridiculously cheap, ultra-fast fashion helped turn shopping into content, and content into another reason to shop. France is trying to interrupt that loop now by going after the price, the advertising and eventually the desirability surrounding it.
Obviously, there’s a sustainability question underneath all of this. A €7 top still requires fabric, water, energy, labour, packaging and transport. When clothes are produced in enormous quantities and designed around constantly changing trends, that low price starts looking a little less innocent. If we’re honest, we all already caught us there. And France wants some of those hidden costs to become harder to ignore. In this case, companies can be required to show information about environmental impact, repair and recycling. Suddenly, that €7 top has a little more explaining to do.
Still, there’s an awkward question here: why are people buying it in the first place? Fashion constantly tells us that keeping up matters. Nowadays, trends arrive through our phones at a speed our wardrobes and bank accounts were never designed for. And telling someone to “buy better” sounds juicy when a €200 shirt is an option. For many people, it isn’t. There’s something paradox about an industry selling aspiration to everyone and then judging people for accessing the cheapest version of it.
Also, the new law mainly targets ultra-fast fashion like Shein and Temu. Brands like Zara and H&M are largely spared from its toughest rules. Sure, they don’t operate exactly the same way. But they still produce huge amounts of clothing at high speed too. So if France really wants to make fashion more sustainable, we have to ask: where exactly does “too fast” begin?
That idea gets even more interesting when we look at what’s happening on the other side of fashion. Recently, Zara has signed John Galliano for a two-year collaboration, with the former Dior and Margiela designer bringing his archive and creative language to one of the biggest retail brands in the world. Means, while France is making one version of mass fashion less desirable, another is getting dressed up in the cultural codes of luxury.
Couture once sat comfortably at the top, high street somewhere in the middle and bargain fashion at the bottom. Now Zara can borrow the cultural credibility of Galliano as a vail while Shein becomes the kind of fashion governments actively want us to avoid: one version gets designer prestige, another gets regulation.
That’s why September will be worth watching guys. Let’s see, perhaps people buy less. Maybe platforms change. Or potentially consumption somehow moves towards brands that sit safely outside the definition of ultra-fast fashion. Because making the most extreme version of overconsumption less attractive doesn’t automatically make fashion sustainable and we might just become more selective about where we overconsume.
Of course, treating ultra-fast fashion as if a €4 dress appears from nowhere was never going to be sustainable, and putting responsibility on the companies fuelling that system is a meaningful move. But if Shein becomes fashion’s unacceptable face while Zara gets Galliano and H&M has Stella McCartney, we are not genuinely changing the system. We just drawing a prettier line through the same culture of constant consumption.
Sustainability cannot only mean replacing one shopping app with a more respectable logo. It has to change our relationship with how much clothing is produced, how quickly we expect trends to change and how disposable we allow fashion to become. France has positively started by asking when fast becomes too fast. The harder question tho is what comes next: how much fashion is too much?