Global Fashion Governance - The United States
Understanding the evolving landscape of United States fashion policies and laws, from trade agreements to environmental safety
This is Part 1 of 4 in a series called Global Fashion Governance. Over the next two weeks, I’ll be exploring various laws and policies that are changing or are currently in place and how they affect the entire value chain, especially the end customer. While dissecting each and every policy for each region isn’t feasible, I’ll cover some of the most important and far reaching ones. First up is the United States. Please note I am not a lawyer and this isn’t meant to be legal advice.
It’s always fun to talk about the fashion gold standard for marketing, retail experiences, product innovation, etc., but there’s another side of fashion that consumers should pay more attention to. Policies can be dry and boring but some of them are crucial to how much we spend, how safe these products are, and how companies are able to market to and interact with us. Allow me to dive deeper into a few areas that will dramatically affect Americans reading this regardless the brands we purchase from.
Tariffs
Donald Trump has taken an extremely aggressive stance on tariffs that hasn’t been implemented by a sitting president in roughly 100 years (that’s not an exaggeration; it has literally been a century). They’re currently on a 90 day freeze, but the tariffs themselves are incredibly damaging to the retail industry if they go back into effect. China tariffs were not subject to the freeze so we’ll have a very early idea of how this will all play out. The aftermath will cause more than a handful of disruptions and high costs, but I want to focus on two key areas. First, countries are responding by implementing reciprocal tariffs, which put everyone in a precarious position. Trump hopes that this will cause manufacturing to move back to the states, but this isn’t feasible at all. It would take years for us to onshore and build the necessary infrastructure, and we can’t simply press pause on industries that need this while we play catch up. Even for the companies that produce garments and accessories locally that already claim the “Made in the USA” moniker, they still have to source raw material from other countries. Companies are able to apply to the federal government for exclusions to these tariffs, but as you can imagine, this is an incredibly long and arduous game that only larger companies can win. Nike, Amazon, Walmart, Gap and Target spent a collective $22.5m on lobbying to make sure their exclusions were granted for footwear and apparel during Trump’s first term1. This unfortunately means the brunt of the tariffs hit small and medium sized businesses, aka the companies that need these exclusions the most. Another repercussion is that consumers will have a much different (read: worse) product selection. Companies can only do so much to change pricing before it literally doesn’t make financial sense to produce for and sell within a region. We’re on the brink of being in a world where brands will have to remove items or full product lines from stock in America. Sure, there’s the possibility of using different resources from different countries with lower tariffs, but this requires entirely too much work. Brands would have to spend years of product testing, consumer insights studies, and spend millions of dollars to see if denim, as an example, from another country they haven’t sourced from before is something their customers would like. Spoiler alert: you’re going to be hard pressed to find a proper substitute for raw selvage denim from Japan if that’s what you already use.
Toxic Chemicals
Food scientists have been discussing what we shouldn’t put in our bodies for quite a while, and now we have a clearer picture and protections for things that shouldn’t be in our clothes. Starting in the 1940s, it was common for apparel companies to use PFAS (or Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) to make various garments more resistant to elements like water, fire, etc. It was a cheap solution for brands but it came at a massive cost to consumers far beyond the price tag. Over the years scientists have concluded that, depending on the frequency of exposure, too much interaction with PFAS chemicals have led to increased risk of cancer, higher cortisol levels, reduced immune system efficiency, developmental effects in newborns, and reproductive issues with women who are or are trying to get or are already pregnant2. Earlier this year, California, New York and Minnesota banned the sales of clothing with PFAS in their respective states. All of these policies having milestone rollouts that give brands time to change the processing of their raw materials in order to comply. The other problem is that PFAS are also called “forever chemicals” because when people throw clothes away that contain these toxins and eventually sit in landfills, there is a high chance for those same toxins to seep into the ground, become a risk to our environment, and increase everyone’s exposure. Knowing that these chemicals don’t just dissipate over time, clothes with these chemicals also can’t ever be up-cycled safely to be repurposed into different items.
It’s important to note that with the slashing of the EPA budget and the agency’s change in direction, these state level policies may quickly become undone. Even though states act as the enforcer, it’s up to the EPA to establish guidance on which chemicals and at which levels are too toxic for consumer use. If there are no strict guidelines on what can’t be used, these policies become useless.
Laws Against Greenwashing
If you aren’t as familiar with the term, the concept of greenwashing is defined as intentionally misleading customers with false claims of a product’s impact on the environment. The FTC and the SEC are jointly tasked with enforcing these laws and regulations. California is leading the way in this category as well as they have more specific state laws around forcing companies to disclose information when they sell products within the state. For example, the FTC would pursue claims against companies misusing the terms “eco-friendly” or “sustainable”, but California would further investigate brands who use “carbon-neutral” or “net-zero” verbiage since they’re deeply concerned with limiting and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. California also requires companies that sell products in the state to disclose further information regardless of claims if revenue is at a certain level (specifically at the $500m and $1b per year thresholds.) Federal enforcement has been waining over the last year and a half3, but it’s unclear if this is because there were so many cases post pandemic that companies and their marketing teams decided not to risk getting fined/investigated, or if the agencies themselves have been turning a blind eye.
A lot of this information is admittedly bleak, but subscribers of The Fabric of Culture (and those who haven’t subscribed yet) deserve to be as informed as possible. We still have agency and should remember that who we vote for, the companies we buy from, and the clothes we wear should always serve us and not the other way around. The more we voice that we want to keep ourselves and our families safe with the clothing we wear and not go broke doing so, the more executives and politicians will be forced to listen.
WWD Voices Podcast; Tariff Turmoil: What Now, What Next?
Environmental Protection Agency; PFAS Explained
White & Case; Navigating the Evolving Era of Greenwashing Regulations in the Fashion Industry