In the same week France’s lawmakers agreed the final text of a law written to curb overconsumption, the body that counts what the country buys reported that it had never bought more. Refashion put 3.6 billion new items of clothing, linen and footwear on the French market in 2025, close to ten million a day, the latest in a run of records set while the bill was being written. The coincidence is the finding: more than two years of legislating against overconsumption has not bent the demand curve the law was drafted to bend.

The law itself is specific, targeted and slow. Its compromise text, struck by a joint committee of deputies and senators on 17 June, lets the state define “ultra fast-fashion” by decree, bans advertising for the brands that qualify, and sets a penalty of up to half an item’s price on the least virtuous sellers. The Senate had passed an earlier version 337 to one the previous June; the National Assembly opened the file in early 2024. Final votes fall in late June, and the penalty takes effect on 1 September 2026. Through every month of that passage, the number it was meant to suppress rose.

To survive contact with French industry, the law was narrowed until it points almost entirely outward. Lawmakers made its two qualifying tests cumulative rather than alternative: a seller is caught only if its range is vast and it fails to fund repair, an “and” written to spare domestic chains such as Kiabi and Decathlon. What stays in the net is the foreign ultra-fast-fashion slice, Shein and Temu above all. The scoping matters because the channels driving the record are broad, not narrow, with online-only sellers up 12 percent by volume and discounters up three. A levy aimed at two importers does little to a tide rising across the whole price floor.

The reason a brand penalty cannot bend the curve is printed on the price tag. Seven in ten items sold last year were entry-level pieces averaging €8.30, the figure Refashion sets beside the €8.50 the average second-hand item now fetches. New clothing has reached parity with used, which dissolves the premise beneath circular-economy policy: there is no thrift dividend to capture once the cheapest new shirt costs less than its used equivalent. A surcharge of a few euros, capped at a fraction of the price and applied only to the sellers the law names, is a charge on the label, leaving the habit it was meant to curb intact. Buying new has become the rational purchase, and raising the price of one brand does not touch that logic.

The law regulates who supplies the volume, not whether the volume is bought.

The strongest case for the law is that it has not yet been tried. Its penalty does not bite until September, the advertising ban will only then begin to thin the feeds that sell Shein, and demand measured before either lands says nothing about the demand that follows. If the malus lifts the delivered price of the marginal foreign garment enough to push buyers toward fewer, better pieces, the curve bends and 2026 breaks the streak; that is the condition under which this thesis fails, and it is not far-fetched. What weakens it is the architecture France has already shown. The penalty reaches only the slice the drafters left in the net. The European Commission may not close the small-parcel exemption that lets those parcels enter duty-free until 2028, and Paris has been pursuing a separate €2 levy on each parcel because the main tool arrives late and narrow. A policy that must be supplemented before it begins is not one its own authors expect to move the volume.

If the penalty falls only on the foreign slice while domestic discounters grow and new clothing keeps undercutting resale, the likeliest reading of 2026 is another record set under a tougher law. The heap does not care which logo sits on top of it: Refashion’s general director, Maud Hardy, notes that two-thirds of the clothing bought — itself 82 percent of all items — will be burned or buried, and a rule that rearranges the supplier mix changes the label on the pile without changing its height. France has done the harder political work — defining ultra-fast-fashion, facing down the lobby, surviving the joint committee — and pointed all of it at who sells, while the number that fills the landfill records how much is bought. Writing the law against volume rather than against a business model was an option at the start, and it remains one after the September vote. Until that choice is made, a rising number is not evidence the law failed. It is evidence the law did exactly what its drafters narrowed it to do.