France Targets Fast Fashion As Shein Discloses An Emissions Surge

Just released: The AI Report 2025

Almost a year on from our first AI report, and artificial intelligence in fashion and beauty is entering a different era – one where defined products, with clear benefits, are starting to replace open-ended possibilities, and where agentic AI is beginning to take a quantifiable shape.

Our newly launched AI Report 2025 – sponsored by our longtime partners at MMGNET Group – is designed to examine: the various ways that AI is becoming part of the machinery of fashion and beauty, and what this means for the people who keep that machine turning today.

The AI Report 2025 is built to offer a detailed, objective view of how artificial intelligence is being used across the fashion and beauty industry.  We spoke with people building the tools, those using them daily, and those grappling with what it means to hand certain decisions over to a machine. Some of the answers are straightforwardly promising. Others are more complicated.

Different sides of fashion’s systemic impact

The latest in an ongoing salvo of regulations that target the high-volume side of fashion, France just approved a bill aimed at curbing the environmental excess of what the government defines as ultra fast fashion. It introduces new taxes, mandates transparency measures, and proposes the roll-out of advertising shackles to be placed on high volume, low cost clothing companies. The targets were clear, as were the motives: slow the churn, reduce waste, and make what is, by most metrics, fashion’s most profitable business model accountable for the wake it’s leaving behind.

It’s the kind of bill that might once have seemed largely symbolic – something that could be introduced and quietly walked back. But now, with existing punitive regulations already in effect in the EU and, of all places, the USA, the urgency behind the need for implementation is harder to ignore. Days after the French Senate approved the legislation (unanimously no less), Shein released its latest emissions report. The two weren’t necessarily connected, but the line between them is still strong: Shein’s 2024 footprint places the company among the world’s top polluters. 

According to its own disclosures, Shein’s emissions now rival those of entire nations. Their disclosure shows rising transport emissions – an over 13% increase from the year before. Taken as a whole, the brand’s extended supply chain now emits over eleven million tonnes of C02 equivalent, which is, by some estimations, more than three times the footprint of Inditex – itself not exactly a small company! 

It probably goes without saying, but the biggest increase came from Scope 3 emissions. These are the sprawling, hard-to-measure emissions we see across supply chain, transport, warehousing, materials, packaging and returns, or essentially everything that sits upstream of the disclosing company’s direct control. At Shein, those emissions have risen by more than 170% in just two years, and unlike other companies who have little hope of vertical integration, Shein has a stronger claim than almost anyone else to be able to – if it wanted – directly monitor and reverse the course of these increases.

This disconnect between the operational benefits of scale and abdication (to a greater or lesser degree) of responsibility for the negative impacts of that scale is, essentially, now just part of the context fashion operates within. Many ultra-fast models function as integrated global systems when you look at them from one angle, but then the opposite when viewed from the side. These are flows that are streamlined for volume and control, but seemingly not for mitigation.

This is where pressure is beginning to build. The French law suggests a policy direction that’s more targeted, and perhaps better calibrated for the reality of making clothing through a distributed and fragmented supply chain. And for all the success that ultra fast fashion companies have achieved, investor scrutiny of sustainability claims is continuing to sharpen – meaning that the bottom could potentially fall out of this market as attitudes adjust. And some brands appear to be adjusting their operating models.

As a case in point: Chanel’s announcement last week fits that latter category. The company launched Nevold (short for “Never Old”), a textile recycling platform built to reduce Scope 3 emissions and support resilience in its supply chain. Chanel relies heavily on materials like cotton, silk, and cashmere, which make up 80 percent of its fibre volumes. All three are under growing pressure, economically, environmentally, and politically.

In this way, Nevold addresses two structural concerns as well as beginning to move the needle on sustainability claims. The first is access to high quality raw materials in a world of increasing resource instability. The second is compliance with emerging regulations that holds brands accountable for emissions across the full value chain. Notably: Chanel hasn’t positioned the move as a brand campaign, but rather as a response to operational risk. 

The platform is also built to extend fibre life, track and manage internal waste, and eventually integrate with outside partners through shared systems and digital infrastructure. That work signals a move in how emissions are understood. Transforming abstract targets into materials challenges tied to cost, continuity, and compliance. 

Needless to say: any company with a global supply chain is carrying similar liabilities. Most haven’t mapped them yet, partly because the digital systems to measure and manage Scope 3 emissions consistently are still underdeveloped, fragmented in terms of the data they consume, or based on proprietary methodologies. Until brands can see their emissions, they have a reasonable excuse for not being able to reduce them. This is a data visibility problem as much as a policy one. While some still favour offsets or carbon claims, Chanel’s approach suggests a slower, more internal move, less oriented around consumer perception, and more around internal control – a more lasting one, potentially.

The stories this week aren’t about placing blame, what we’re really talking about is scale. France put a line in the sand, and Shein’s data showed why that line matters. While Chanel’s infrastructure work hints at how brands might begin to respond from within their own supply chains.

Shein is still scaling, but scrutiny is scaling too, and in some corners of the industry, the parts not directly visible to shoppers, the response is starting to form.