When President Donald Trump started his trade war with China earlier this year, the fast-fashion industry seemed poised to take a major hit. Stiff tariffs and changes to other trade rules pushed the Chinese-founded companies Shein and Temu to raise prices, and their sales plummeted. (Sales of brands from other countries, such as the Spanish-based Zara and the Sweden-based H&M, also flagged.) At the time, some commentators suggested that these developments could be a silver lining to Trump’s economic agenda: Perhaps the higher costs would encourage more mindful consumption—and diminish the appeal of clothes from the fast-fashion industry, which is notorious for its exploitative working conditions and harmful environmental practices.
But that argument misunderstands the nature of the fast-fashion sector. It is a giant, lucrative, nimble industry that isn’t tied to one specific country. Shein and Temu, which manufacture most of their goods in China, have been boosting advertising in Europe and Latin America to find new customers, and H&M is planning to increase production in Central America in part to avoid U.S. tariffs on its Chinese-made goods. Target is testing a new system that replicates Shein’s model of shipping products directly from factories to shoppers, one of the keys to hyper-low costs. And although Shein’s and Temu’s sales are still down, other budget clothing companies, including H&M, are seeing their sales grow. Even if American consumers were to stop buying from Shein completely, fast fashion’s core problems—the labor violations and negative environmental impact—would be unlikely to disappear. Fast fashion has always been a scapegoat: the most visible symbol of the issues that plague all sorts of clothing companies, whether they sell luxury products or athleisure or basics.
Individual consumer choices, such as buying less or opting for organic clothing, may help small, more sustainable brands stay afloat. But they don’t generally lead to the kinds of structural changes, such as stricter regulations or public investment in more environmentally friendly fibers, that would be required to overhaul the clothing industry truly. Fashion—and its many problems—has never belonged to just one country. Change requires a steady global economy and international cooperation. But America’s trade war and isolationism are alienating nearly every country it does business with, and halting any momentum to make the fashion industry more responsible. In fact, if the trade war continues, our clothes may eventually be made under even worse conditions than they are today.
The roots of today’s fashion woes go back decades. The common narrative is that in the 1980s and ’90s, American politicians opened up international trade in ways that helped big corporations but ignored workers and the environment. This was a boon for fashion brands: Most brands stopped making their own clothes and started working with garment factories in lower-wage countries such as China or Bangladesh. In the early aughts, fast-fashion companies in particular capitalized on the shift by keeping prices low not only with cheap labor but also with cheaper materials. American manufacturing lost an astonishing number of jobs from 1979 to 2019, including 81 percent of the positions in apparel and textiles. In the history of the world, people had never been able to buy so many cute clothes for the price of a sandwich—and for some shoppers, clothing became something to buy and dispose of. From 1990 to 2018, the amount of clothing and footwear going to landfills in the United States tripled.
The downsides of the system eventually became clearer. And in more recent years, American politicians and the media have zeroed in on China as one of the worst offenders—more specifically, on Shein and Temu. In 2023, a congressional investigation found that Temu was doing “next to nothing to keep its supply chains free from slave labor.” NGO and media reports have found that workers at Shein suppliers clock in for 75-hour weeks, at times with only one day off a month, in violation of China’s own labor laws. In addition, about two-thirds of Shein’s clothes are made of polyester—a fossil-fuel-based fiber that sheds microplastics into waterways every time it’s laundered. (Temu, according to the investigation, denied direct responsibility and said that it asked suppliers to follow a code of conduct that includes a “zero-tolerance policy” for forced labor. Shein has responded to these findings by stating that it is “committed to ensuring the fair and dignified treatment of all workers within our supply chain” and that it monitors factories for compliance with Shein’s code of conduct. It has also worked to cut waste.)
But fashion’s harsh working conditions are not isolated to China or even to the fast-fashion sector. Long hours, low wages, and other poor working conditions remain widespread across the global fashion industry. Last year, the luxury brands Armani and Dior were caught using sweatshops to make handbags in Italy. A recent investigation found that workers at a Nike supplier factory in Cambodia were fainting because of extreme heat and exhaustion. Because most fashion brands work with garment factories that they do not own, these companies’ responses to accusations of bad practices have followed a pattern: The brands say that they care about workers, but then assign responsibility for workplace conditions to the factories, which are typically the ones responsible for following the law. Nike has stated that its code of conduct sets rules for suppliers and that the company “is committed to ethical and responsible manufacturing.” Armani has said that it aims to reduce abuses in its supply chain, and Dior has said that sweatshops in Italy “contradict its values” and that the factories hid the problems from the company.
Some fashion commentators suggest that producing everything in the United States—which manufactures a mere 3.6 percent of the clothes it consumes, down from 98 percent in the early 1960s—could help mitigate the broader social problems associated with fast fashion. Trump’s tariff regime also taps into the bipartisan hope that a demand for more “Made in America” products will lead to an increase in middle-class jobs. Making more clothes in the United States, though, is not an automatic win for ethical or sustainable production. An uncomfortable truth is that many remaining U.S. garment workers earn a smaller share of a living wage than their counterparts in some of the countries where a lot of American clothing is made, such as Cambodia or Vietnam. A 2022 U.S. Department of Labor survey of more than 50 American garment manufacturers, for instance, found that 80 percent of them had violated labor laws; in one case, workers were paid as little as $1.58 an hour. Many Americans are also reluctant to work in factories because they believe the jobs don’t pay well enough and are typically less comfortable and less flexible than those in other sectors, such as the service industry.
Efforts to bring garment production back to the U.S. also often overlook a complex reality: Many of the most cutting-edge, eco-friendly factories and producers are now located overseas, including in China. (Just as abuses and examples of bad practices are now global problems, so too are examples of innovation and sustainability.)
In fact, current U.S. trade policies create significant difficulties for companies working to produce in the United States and reduce their environmental impact. Many U.S. brands rely on imported fabrics, including eco-friendly materials such as linen, a plant-based fiber practically no longer grown in the United States. These imports are now more expensive, making it harder for some American companies to stay in business. And if companies have to absorb more costs from tariffs, they may look to trim sustainability efforts, such as reducing carbon emissions, which don’t directly generate revenue or increase sales during tough economic times. “The tariffs are a lose-lose for everyone,” Brian La Plante, the senior sustainability manager of the Japanese zipper giant YKK, told me, “with the environment being the biggest loser of all.”
Without universal standards requiring companies to protect basic worker rights and environmental standards, responsible companies will continue to be undercut by competitors selling clothes at a lower price and using poor business practices. Factory production needs to get a lot cleaner and more efficient to clothe the world. There’s no cheap version of this transformation: Picture the resources needed to reconfigure huge, coal-hungry textile mills to run on renewable energy, or to develop entirely new fibers and machines that can spin them without shedding tiny plastic particles or requiring toxic chemicals. A major fashion-industry report estimated that cutting carbon emissions to net zero to meet global climate targets could cost upwards of a trillion dollars.
Regardless of what might happen with tariffs in the near future, the outlook for sustainable and ethical production in the fashion industry is not promising. The Trump administration is broadly hostile to corporate climate commitments and environmental, social, and governance programs, which many companies are now trimming. American foreign-aid cuts and the shutting down of USAID have gutted labor-rights initiatives in the garment industry overseas.
Even major legislative efforts that could help reform the fashion industry are taking a hit. In the past two years, the European Union passed what is currently the most comprehensive effort to require companies to report on and uphold basic human rights and environmental standards. The laws apply to many companies operating in the EU, including some American or Chinese brands. Now proposed amendments introduced this past February seem to be catering to pressure to weaken the laws, including one that would reduce the number of companies required to follow one of the laws by about 80 percent. In March, a Senate Republican also introduced a bill to exempt American companies from the most stringent of the new rules, while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has argued that one of the laws would increase American companies’ “liability and reputational risk.” All of this undercuts the EU legislation’s potential to address some of fashion’s biggest problems.
Of course, the trade war could have one benefit: If it makes Americans more conscientious consumers, that will be a remarkable shift in the world’s most stuff-hungry nation. But less consumption in itself won’t be a cure-all. Politicians have so much power over what we buy, where it’s made, and what it costs. The harms of fast fashion will continue to pile up unless its global foundations are fixed.
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