Kiabi, C&A, Petit Bateau, La Redoute, Galeries Lafayette, Chaussea, Damart, Celio, Okaïdi, Zalando, ASOS, Cdiscount, and even the FEVAD and the Medef… French and European brands or organizations, to varying degrees, have urged a review of the modalities of the new anti-fast-fashion environmental penalty, deeming it complex and difficult to apply. Even Refashion, the eco-organization charged with implementing it, says the scheme is impossible to implement within the planned timelines.
Effective September 1 and officially designed to tackle ultra-fast fashion, the new environmental penalty has sparked a backlash broader than the Chinese players Shein and Temu, which it is meant to target first and foremost. During the summer public consultation, criticisms piled up: calculation too complex, rules unclear, enforcement impossible, risk of penalizing small and medium-sized enterprises, uncertain treatment of marketplaces, and a repair criterion deemed absurd.
Originally, the objective was indeed to go after the scale of Asian giants like Shein, which would offer more than 1.7 million SKUs, versus 17,400 for Kiabi. Yet in practice, the boundary is far less clear-cut and risks affecting the activities of other players like Kiabi, Decathlon, Jules, Petit Bateau, E.Leclerc, or Carrefour
The text notably provides for a presumption of 100,000 references for certain brands sold through a marketplace. A threshold deemed arbitrary by FEVAD, the Federation of e-commerce and distance selling, which fears that it will penalize SMEs that use e-commerce platforms only as a distribution channel. ASOS, Zalando, Cdiscount, or Beaumanoir have thus requested that this presumption be removed or, at least, not automatically applied.
Behind this 100,000-reference rule lies a mechanism particularly hard to untangle: who is measured, who reports, and who pays? Should a platform be responsible for the references of a third-party seller? How to determine its true sales volume? And how to monitor catalogs that continuously evolve? FEVAD is not mistaken in demanding precisely to “clarify who is measured, who reports, and who pays.”
Second difficulty, and not the least: the repair criterion, which mechanically penalizes the cheapest garments. The calculation compares the cost of a repair to the price of the garment. The more expensive the garment, the higher its score. A T-shirt sold for 40 euros could thus obtain a repair ratio of 100%, versus 0% for the same T-shirt sold for 10 euros. According to Kiabi and FEVAD, a child’s underwear item would need to cost more than 27 euros to reach the best score…
A logic verging on the absurd: who would, in fact, repair a 10-euro T-shirt when the repair could cost as much as the garment? Who repairs underwear that costs 5 or 50 euros? The scheme conflates low price with low durability and mechanically penalizes the low-end segment, which accounts for seven out of ten clothing purchases in France. Thus to the detriment of the poorest households.
When Refashion, the linchpin of the scheme, concludes its inapplicability
The body tasked with running the system itself seems to conclude that the scheme is inapplicable. Refashion argues that the scheme does not meet “the minimum conditions necessary for its implementation.” Data are hard to verify, catalogs and prices constantly change, declarations checks are not sufficiently secure: the eco-organization argues that a reliable, exhaustive, and enforceable check is not possible in its current form. It even deemed, during the summer, the September 1 implementation to be “highly unrealistic” and recommended delaying it.
But that was not enough to stop the implementation. Since Tuesday, September 1, the penalty is supposed to apply, with a charge up to 12 euros per item in 2026, then 19.50 euros in 2030, capped at 50% of the price of the item. With the risk, in aiming at a few ultra-fast fashion platforms, of penalizing a large portion of the French and European textile ecosystem through unforeseen side effects.
