Fashion News Round-Up (June 13th, 2025)
Interesting industry news from around the world over the last week.
Happy Friday everyone! We’ve got some really interesting things happening around the fashion world that you should be up to date on. Some of the articles are unfortunately behind a paywall, but I gave a summary of them so you can get the main points. Enjoy!
Saks Global Update: What’s on the Minds of Vendors
Drawing on my article from late April, it looks like Saks Fifth Avenue is finally starting to make good on their promise to pay its vendors back. Over the last two weeks, small to mid-sized brands that wholesale through Saks have been receiving payment for their most recent shipments. Though most are still owed a lot of back payments from last year’s inventory, this is at least a good start. Vendors are now voicing concerns about where their focus is given the lack of investment in in-store activations. Saks’ first interest payment for the bonds they took out for the Neiman Marcus acquisition are also due at the end of this month, so they’re nowhere in the clear financially. We’ll be monitoring this story closely for the rest of this year and next.
French Senate Weighs in Favor of New Law to Regulate Ultra-Fast Fashion
Temu and Shein might have one less market to compete within moving forward. Three days ago France’s senate almost unanimously (there was one holdout) passed a bill that would force brands to report their negative environmental impact to customers and force these conglomerates to pay hefty fines if certain standards are not met. Now this isn’t nearly as big of a hit to their businesses compared to if the United States did the same thing given France’s size, but it may be one of the biggest warning shots we’ve seen yet. If other regions with a sustainability focus start to get on board with this, we’ll probably see these companies start pumping a lot more money into lobbying efforts because let’s be honest, they’re not going to actually do away with their environmentally-poor practices.
Stanford Founder Launches World's First Universal Fashion AI Agent to Transform $7.7 Trillion Industry
Stanford might have another unicorn on its hands very soon. Two time Stanford alum Priyanka Ladha is the founder of Kridha, the first fashion AI agent that can work across tens of thousands of websites and covers over 3 million SKUs to deliver a hyper-personalized shopping experience. "We've solved the fundamental scaling problem in fashion AI," Ladha explained. "Our agents work everywhere fashion is sold, without brands needing to change anything, while keeping consumers engaged directly on brand websites. This creates an intelligence layer the industry has never had." Priyanka has a computer vision background and comes from a family that has worked in retail and fashion for 50 years. They’re still in beta with a waitlist sign-up on their website, but I’m extremely interested in what this will look like once it goes live.
Immigration raids in LA strike fear into the fashion industry
ICE raids in Los Angeles have been a disturbing sight to watch and now industry leaders are starting to raise concerns about the aftermath. Agents have been seen walking into several clothing manufacturing facilities in DTLA in the last several days. This could be catastrophic to smaller brands who depend on this labor. “Over one-third of the more than 300,000 workers producing clothing and shoes in the US are immigrants, according to an analysis by Fwd.us, an immigration reform organisation, while about 30,000 are estimated to be undocumented.” Trump recently stated that given how many immigrants have been detained and deported that were once working on farms, there will be a “refocus on criminals,” which of course doesn’t make sense given that’s what he said was the focus when this first started.
LVMH recognizes three Tech Partners for exceptional collaborations with its Maisons at 2025 LVMH Innovation Award ceremony
Since 2017, LVMH has been awarding startups their Innovation Award at Viva Technology, an annual tech conference held each summer in Paris. These are startups that have partnered with the company over the last 12 months and have seen a positive business impact. The winners were:
Best Business Prize: Kahoona (an audience segmentation tool), for its collaboration with Dior
Best Impact Prize: Genesis (which helps to measure, monitor, and improve soil health), for its collaboration with Moët Hennessy
Most Promising Prize: OMI (3D modeling software), for its collaboration with Guerlain
Kridha is interesting! It's a bit of a race in Fashion search technology. I just read that Daydream just raised $50M seed round for similar idea.