Australia is the world’s largest consumer of new clothes - are France’s new ultra fast fashion laws the answer?
France has introduced new laws to curb ultra-fast-fashion giants Shein and Temu. With the average Australian buying 56 new items of clothing each year, Cheek Media’s Varsha Yajman asks if we should we be looking to do the same.
The average Australian buys 56 new items of clothing per year, making Australia the world’s largest consumer of textiles per capita. To make matters worse, the average value of each item Australians buy is just $13 - far lower than in the UK ($40), the USA ($24), Japan ($30), or Brazil ($16), according to a 2024 report by The Australia Institute.
And clothing consumption is only increasing, with an additional 1.3 million Aussies on Shein and Temu websites in 2025. Ultra-fast fashion brands have even faster production cycles than fast fashion brands like Zara and H&M, with Good On You, a directory that rates fashion labels on sustainability, describing their clothes as “ultra plastic”.
In 2023, Australia attempted to push for sustainable clothing production by launching Seamless, a voluntary national program that requires brands to adopt a 4c-per-garment levy to fund programs incentivising sustainable clothing design and aims to create a circular clothing industry by 2030.
Ainsley Simpson, the CEO of Seamless, tells Cheek that Seamless was established to incentivise companies that place the most clothing on the Australian market to pay for their clothing waste instead of it “being unfairly shifted onto Australian households, local councils and charities”.
She says that “over time [the scheme]... will help change current business models which drive wasteful volumes,” but notes that “voluntary schemes can only go so far”.
Companies such as Shein, Temu and Amazon, which hold a large share of Australia’s clothing market, have failed to sign up to the scheme.
In its recently published report, Seamless calls for immediate federal government regulation and targets to hold clothing producers accountable for their impact.
“A level playing field ensures every business contributes fairly, better product design is rewarded and responsibility sits where it belongs - with every company clothing Australians.”
Legislation as the solution
Riddled with problems similar to those in Australia, France has recently taken legislative action to curb ultra-fast-fashion giants Shein and Temu. At the end of June, the country passed a law penalising the giants for every item of clothing they sell and banning their advertising, including influencer promotions. The fines range from €0.25 to €6 (approx. A$0.40 to A$9.9) per item of clothing sold, and could rise to as high as €6 (approx. A$16.50) per product in 2030.
Tamara Leacock, the founder of Melbourne-based slow fashion brand Remuse, says France’s law is “an important signal that governments are beginning to recognise ultra-fast fashion as a systemic environmental and social issue rather than simply a consumer choice”.
For Leacock, slow and ethical fashion is “about fundamentally changing our relationship with clothing”, looking at “the entire life of a garment” - from who made it to what happens to it at the end. That, she says, means considering transparency, designing for durability, “and creating clothing people genuinely want to keep for many years”.
Remuse embodies slow fashion by exploring “circular fashion through an Afrofuturist lens” and producing garments “in small quantities using deadstock, reclaimed or lower-impact materials, with an emphasis on longevity, repairability and adaptability”.
Nina Gbor, the author of The Australia Institute report, a sustainable educator and the founder of EcoStyles, says this type of law may be even more necessary in Australia, given that only “less than 3%” of its clothing is manufactured onshore.
Gbor notes the challenges in implementing this legislation, as Australia has trade agreements with countries where many fast-fashion companies are based, and those companies could be fined if they do not meet the standards under the fast-fashion law.
She also acknowledges concerns that this type of law may run counter to free trade policies, but says that “fast and ultra-fast fashion companies have been undercutting Australian and other fashion brands in the world through design theft.”
“Fast and ultra-fast fashion retail prices do not compete with Australia’s luxury brands on price, but when they copy the designs of these less affordable or luxury brands and sell them for a tiny fraction of the real cost, it undermines the brand and reduces its ability to have profit margins. Dupes are unfair.”
Ensuring genuine implementation
Gbor has started a petition calling on the Australian federal government to pass similar legislation to curb fast fashion and has called for Seamless to become mandatory rather than merely voluntary.
However, Gbor notes that, if implemented in Australia, the fast-fashion penalties must be “done in a fair and equitable way across all offending companies from everywhere in the world without scapegoating only a few offenders.”
The scapegoating of fast fashion companies under French law has come under fire for being “watered down” by groups such as the Stop Fast-Fashion coalition and the Greens Party. The first version of the bill included fast-fashion companies such as Zara and H&M to mitigate fashion overproduction, overconsumption, and waste, and to promote responsible production, circularity, and regeneration. The reasons for the bill’s narrowing are unclear.
Gbor says the narrowing will allow “existing and emerging offender fashion companies to continue or increase overproduction levels without penalties and may indicate discrimination or a pursuit of “economic outcomes, protectionism or competition, ‘ as opposed to a bill that’s founded on sustainability.”
Leacock highlights the importance of ensuring that sustainable clothing alternatives are economically viable and of enforcing these policies, pairing them with an “investment in circular economies, local manufacturing, repair industries, education and independent designers” alongside the legislation.
“The goal isn’t perfection - it’s creating systems that respect both people and the environments we depend upon.”
About the author
Varsha Yajman is the Digital Content Producer at Cheek Media. She is a youth advocate and lawyer with a background in climate litigation and is passionate about looking at the intersection between race, climate justice, and mental health.
Such an important conversation! So good to have you officially part of the team, Varsha <3
It's beyond gross that we consume so much. I'm doing buy no clothes/shoes this year (not even second hand). Photos should be displayed in clothing shops of where all these clothes end up and what they're doing to the environment. Let's normalise re-wearing the same clothes again and again.