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At Innovation Forum’s recent apparel sector conferences, no topic drew more interest from participants than policy and regulation. That holds at an industry level, where companies that have operated for decades with minimal legislation are now working out what compliance actually requires, and at an individual one, where people doing that work increasingly see regulation as the only route to systemic change – voluntary targets and peer coalitions have failed to shift the industry at the pace required.
The new French law is a useful test case for that hope. Its two-and-a-half-year journey, and the shape it eventually took, show how ambitious regulation gets reworked by economic anxiety and geopolitics. There is not the time to wait for legislation to force change, even if that would be the more convincing business case to push for companies internally.
Bill evolution
The legislation survived five government reshuffles and the parliamentary dissolution of June 2024 before the French parliament adopted it definitively on 29 June 2026. The original 2024 text, as passed by the lower house, targeted “fast fashion” as a category rather than “ultra-fast fashion specifically — a much wider net that would have caught all mass-market chains irrespective of geography.
It was narrowed by the French senate in June 2025 to target only Asian ultra-fast-fashion platforms (Shein, Temu and AliExpress), excluding European players that had initially been in scope, following heavy lobbying from trade groups. “Let’s first focus on fighting ultra-fast fashion before harming French retailers,” Yohann Petiot of the Alliance du Commerce told Le Monde.
Industry lobbying wasn’t the only force reshaping the bill. The EU added its own friction. The European commission objected twice: first with a reserved opinion in September 2025 that extended the standstill period, then again in April 2026 over the advertising ban and a planned tax on small parcels, arguing both conflicted with the e-commerce directive’s country-of-origin principle.
France negotiated around the objection rather than through it. The parcel tax was pulled from the bill entirely and folded into the 2026 budget law instead, already in force since March 2026, while the rest of the text was reworked to fit the EU framework without dropping its central tool, the per-item penalty. A joint parliamentary committee struck a compromise in June, and the standoff that once threatened to sink the bill is largely settled.
What’s left?
What survived is a penalty built on two cumulative criteria: catalogue breadth, meaning the sheer volume of new items put on sale, and a repairability score measured as the ratio between a product’s price and the cost of repairing it. The financial penalty was strengthened late in the process and will rise from flat baseline of €12 per item in 2026 to €20 by 2030. With that said, it is capped at 50% of the pre-tax price so the fee can never exceed the item’s value, so a €5 dress carries a maximum penalty of €2.50 in 2026.
The legislation also requires ultra-fast fashion companies to display messages on their websites promoting more moderate consumption (e.g. discouraging impulsive buying and encouraging repair, reuse and retaining clothing).
The law also bans advertising by ultra-fast-fashion companies, including paid promotion by influencers. Although one thread remains loose: the advertising ban survived in its broadest form, but the European commission has signalled it may still be rejected, in which case it would fall back to a narrower version covering only social media influencers.
Gaps remain
Even resolved, the law has gaps when it comes to practical implementation as Nicolas Prophte of Denim Deal has highlighted:
- It regulates output, not input: there’s no recycled content minimum or recyclability standard, so a platform can clear the repairability threshold by repricing its SKUs (stock keeping units) rather than changing a product.
- Nobody currently counts how many items a platform actually sells under its own name; customs collects fees on parcels, not garments attributed to a brand.
- The repairability methodology itself, published by the EU’s Joint Research Centre in January 2026, won’t be legally binding until 2026-27, while France’s own thresholds remain undefined nearly two years after they were promised.
- The penalty is pegged to a fixed pre-tax price in a market that reprices dynamically through the day.
- There’s no mechanism for the obligation to display moderation and repair messaging: France’s consumer protection agency lacks the resources to monitor listings updating constantly from outside the EU.
On the face of it, these will gaps leave the law’s core test unenforceable on multiple fronts and big questions still remain on the ban on advertising given social media sites are highly globalised. Haul videos produced outside of France would still be viewable within France.
Who pays?
There’s also a sixth gap that isn’t technical. The law was drafted around volume and pricing behaviour, not around where the cost of either complying with it lands. Given their European counterparts won’t be under the same scrutiny, the brands may look to retain their competitive pricing that has driven growth for them.
One place to bridge the new fees is supplier margins, already thin before this law existed, and the workers reliant upon them. In an industry where fashion brands are already allegedly ‘squeezing’ suppliers with low prices and fixing prices below global inflation according to Clean Clothes Campaign and Private Eye.
None of the drafting addressed that second-order effect; the bill was built to curb overproduction, not to protect the people whose wages move first when a margin gets squeezed. These policy mechanisms that operate as a surcharge have the risk of making a just transition even harder.
EU competitiveness
A pessimistic reading of all this would be that the bill cleared the French parliament and Brussels not because it improves the industry’s environmental footprint. Rather, it advances European competitiveness, raising costs for non-European importers while leaving European retailers largely untouched.
The law draws its hardest line not around a behaviour but around a region, sparing European mass-market chains while training its full force on Asian platforms. The same competitiveness logic sits behind the EU’s Omnibus simplification drive, which has spent the past two years stripping back reporting and due diligence obligations in the name of reducing burden on business. On that reading, Shein and Temu’s European competitors come out ahead without having to change much of their own business practices.
A more optimistic reading would be that the volumes ultra-fast-fashion platforms from Asia produce, and the gamified consumption they’re built to hyper-accelerate, are exactly what the bill is designed to address. There’s a reasonable case for treating these retailers specifically as the right first target. Shein’s fast-to-market strategy has led to a multiplication in styles (with as many as 600,000 styles on sale costing an average of £7.90) and emissions. Stand.Earth’s scorecard, highlights that Shein’s emissions would make it the 100th biggest emitter in the world as a country.
Anne-Cécile Violland, the centre-right member of the French parliament who proposed the initial bill, said legislation was required that could be passed “very quickly … We’re coming down very hard on Shein, and that’s the first step”, she told Agence France-Presse (AFP), adding that she understood the disappointment around the narrower scope. Once the shift begins for a few, some industry watchers predict an expansion to cover more actors and provoke the systems change needed.
It’s important to flag that France isn’t acting alone, either. Italy’s senate proposed a bill in October 2025 focused on a national eco-score system (Sistema Nazionale di Eco Score Tessile – SNET) designed to classify textile products according to environmental impact from a ranking of A-E. Once the technical scoring rules are confirmed, penalising measures will potentially follow but they have already provided explicit definitions of “rapidly renewing fashion” and “ultra-fast-fashion” in the original bill. While the highest impact actors categorised as classes D and E will be prioritised first, all brands selling in Italy will be attributed a score by the government.
Pragmatic possibilities
Regardless of the underlying motive, this is a bill that puts the impacts of ultra-fast and fast fashion onto the policy agenda of a powerful global player in the industry, and there’s real cause to welcome that, even with the carve-outs and unresolved questions intact. Every piece of fashion-sector policy now in force or in motion across Europe, France’s law included, will have pitfalls and will need revision as understanding develops. That’s a normal feature of regulation, not a reason to wait for a better version before acting.
A commonly heard sentiment at Innovation Forum’s apparel sector conferences in 2026 was that companies are waiting to see how the legislation falls. That’s understandable given how badly the delays to other rules such as the EU’s deforestation regulation, and the broader simplification agenda under Omnibus, impacted brands and retailers that had already invested heavily in anticipation of rules that didn’t arrive on schedule.
But policy is never going to be a silver bullet, and the caution that delay has produced is exactly why the apparel sector still needs to keep investing in multi-stakeholder initiatives and industry coalitions that pool capital and resources, pursue the changes that already make economic and environmental sense regardless of what regulation eventually requires, and keep communicating honestly with consumers about what’s actually changing and why.
The answer isn’t to abandon any of these routes in favour of another; it’s to stop treating any single one of them as sufficient on its own, and to keep moving on the solutions that are already scalable while the policy picture continues to take shape.
Niamh Campbell is Innovation Forum’s lead on the apparel and textiles sector.
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