What Happened to France’s Anti-Fast Fashion Bill?

“This is simply a national scandal,” Vestiaire Collective co-founder and president Fanny Moizant said in a fiery social-media post shared late on Friday. “Shein wins again.”

The “scandal” referred to by Moizant is the lack of progress on a radical French bill that envisages imposing a “sin tax”-style penalty as high as €10 ($10.50) per item on environmentally damaging fast fashion.

Though framed as a green initiative when it was introduced last year, its main target is foreign ultra-fast-fashion businesses like Shein and Temu. That helped it draw wide-ranging support from officials keen to protect French brands and manufacturing. The legislation initially appeared on a glide path to becoming law after it was unanimously approved by the French National Assembly (the lower house of the country’s parliament) in March 2024.

But the bill has since stalled as France struggled to form a government in the wake of a messy election over the summer. It was expected to finally face a vote in the Senate next month, but when the official work programme for the session was published last week, the bill wasn’t on the agenda.

The delay appeared to take some members of the Senate by surprise.

“The Government announced to us that it was abandoning [the bill’s] inclusion without giving us any information, apart from ‘a lack of time,’” the bill’s appointed champion in the Senate, Sylvie Valente Le Hir, said in an email.

Anne-Cécile Violland, the National Assembly member who initially spearheaded the anti-fast-fashion bill, said she too has not received clarity on why the bill has not advanced. Officially the government is not against the bill, but it is waiting for an individual party to advance it, she said.

“[That] amounts to saying: no certainty of seeing it registered quickly,” Violland added.

The omission is a blow to advocates like Paris-based Vestiaire, which has waged a years-long campaign against fast fashion. Part lobbying, part marketing, the resale platform’s efforts are pitched to both influence policy and strike a chord with consumers, driving support for secondhand as a more responsible way to shop.

In its Friday post, Vestiaire pointed the finger for the delay at Shein, calling out the ultra-fast-fashion giant’s appointment of former French interior minister Christophe Castaner to an advisory committee in December.

“In just two months Shein managed to cancel the anti-fast-fashion bill,” Moizant said in her post. “We want answers and we want that bill to go back on the agenda of the Senate right now.”

Shein said Castaner’s position is purely consultative. His role on its regional strategic and corporate responsibility committee is to provide independent advice on corporate best practice, it said.

Shein “welcomes the ambition” of the French bill, the company said in an emailed statement. But it raised concerns that the current text targets only a “limited subset” of the fashion sector. “We believe that a balanced approach — rooted in innovation, collaboration, and measurable goals — can address the challenges of the textile industry without compromising accessibility or social equity,” it said.

Shein has invested in lobbying capabilities in multiple countries as it seeks to navigate a path to an initial public offering in the UK and fend off threats to its business model. It’s had several narrow misses; earlier this month, President Donald Trump closed, then reopened, a loophole that allows Shein and other companies to ship small orders from China to the US without paying import duties.

In addition to the proposed penalty levied against products with a high environmental footprint, the French law would ban companies with rapidly renewing product assortments from advertising in France. Funds generated from the new system would be used to subsidise businesses geared towards reducing the industry’s impact.

“This ecological, economic, health and social issue should be a priority for all countries in the world,” said Violland. “The future of our environment, our local and European economy and respect for workers’ rights is at stake.”

Nonetheless, the politics around sustainability regulation is becoming increasingly complex. The European Union, which has long led efforts to make big brands more accountable for environmental and social abuses associated with their operations, is set to publish plans to simplify flagship regulations this month. The stated goal is to improve the trading bloc’s competitiveness, but critics fear it will water down important regulatory protections.

Meanwhile in the US, individual states are still pushing ahead with efforts to toughen up regulatory oversight of the fashion industry, but the Federal government under Donald Trump is dismantling key infrastructure that supports the industry’s efforts to operate more responsibly.

Supporters of France’s anti-fast-fashion bill said they will continue work to push the bill forward. The Senate Committee on Regional Planning and Sustainable Development will examine the text on March 19 and is calling on the government to ensure it is on the public agenda, Valente Le Hir said.

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