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Happy Friday, and what a week it’s been.
There’s been high drama in France, where Shein opened its first permanent physical store and the government moved to suspend its online marketplace. These two things are not necessarily directly correlated, but the parallel timing certainly added to the froth of news about fashion’s favourite bête noire. Is it actually having an impact on the business? Let’s discuss.
Miu Miu’s also in hot water on social media over quality issues. Again — the latest in a litany of luxury brands to face criticism over high-priced products that just don’t last. You’d think consumers would be sick of this by now and demand better, if not because they care about the environmental impact of products that can’t stand up to more than a couple of wears, then because they’re sick of wasting their hard-earned cash. We’ve certainly not reached a tipping point on this, but perhaps each new incident inches us closer to one.
Finally, I’m riffing on the great story our resident sports correspondent Mike Sykes wrote on 3D printing this week. Futuristic printed shoes are back in fashion, but that also could mean good things for the industry’s environmental footprint.
And just a reminder, the UN’s annual COP climate summit kicks off in earnest next week, though many dignitaries are already on the ground in the Brazilian city of Belém for a leaders’ summit that is meant to set the tone for the technical negotiations that start on Monday.
COP is typically a time for brands to publish splashy new climate commitments and talk up all the pilot programmes they’ve been running, but never seem to scale. This year, things feel more subdued, with a US-led backlash against so-called “woke capitalism” making companies much more circumspect about their environmental efforts. We’ll get into it next week.
As always, send me thoughts, feedback, tips and questions.
It’s Not Easy Being Shein
My current favourite reality TV programme is the Shein show.
This season about the company’s bid to take France has proved particularly juicy — and I thought it would be hard to top the high drama of season one’s push to go public and season two’s trade war vicissitudes.
What’s Happened Now?
This week, Shein opened its first permanent store in Paris.
The capital of couture was a bold choice for the ultra-fast-fashion giant. France is a big market for Shein, but it’s also a hugely contentious one. The country has moved to pass some fairly radical legislation that would ban platforms like Shein from advertising and impose “sin-tax” style penalties on polluting products, though how fast the law might come into effect is a little murky given the current unstable nature of French politics.
News that the company planned to launch brick-and-mortar retail spaces in the country has prompted weeks of hand-wringing from local fashion lobbies and political elites.
Department store chain Galeries Lafayette broke ties with its license partner SGM (Societé des Grands Magasins) over its decision to open Shein spaces inside its stores. State-backed bank Caisse des Dépots pulled out from financing SGM’s acquisition of the BHV department store on Rue de Rivoli, where Shein’s Paris store opened Wednesday. La Fédération Française du Prêt à Porter Féminin, a trade group, called it a “black day” for the fashion sector. (If you want to go deeper on all the French drama, read this week’s High Margin newsletter by Robert Williams, which has all the tea).
Shein and SGM, meanwhile, pointed to the round-the-block queues of wannabe Shein customers that formed outside BHV for the store opening. SGM president Frédéric Merlin said in a social media post that nearly 8,000 customers passed through its doors on the first day.
But it’s still not been a good week for Shein in France. The company’s dealing with a parallel scandal over the sale of child-like sex dolls and banned weaponry on its third-party marketplace. Just as it opened its first physical store, the French government has moved to temporarily suspended online sales pending proof the company is compliant with French laws.
Fashion, With a Side of Politics
Such controversy isn’t exactly foreign territory for Shein.
Ever since the e-commerce platform exploded into mainstream consciousness during the pandemic, it has been a lightning rod for heavily politicised criticism.
There is plenty to dig into. The company’s opaque supply chains have been linked to allegations of forced labour. Its hockey-stick growth, largely fuelled by a rapid churn of low-cost polyester products, has turned it into fashion’s biggest polluter. Products sold through its platform are being investigated to check if they meet safety standards. And it’s been hit by a string of European fines for alleged data breaches, fake discounts and greenwashing.
But regulatory pushback against the company has also been accompanied by a healthy dose of anti-Chinese, protectionist sentiment.
Efforts to go public in the US and UK have been stymied by political blowback. The company is reportedly still eyeing a listing, most likely in Hong Kong. A move by the US earlier this year to crackdown on a trade loophole that allowed low-value parcels to enter the country duty free took direct aim at companies like Shein and its rival Temu (though so far the hardest-hit retailer appears to be the luxury e-tailer Ssense). The EU is considering a similar move.
The Cost of Scandal
So how much is all this noise really hurting Shein?
Because the company hasn’t gone public, that’s much harder to answer than it would be with a listed business. Shein doesn’t have to disclose quarterly earnings reports or provide any kind of regular update on how it’s doing.
Credit and debit card data suggests the company has so far proved resilient to trade headwinds. The new tariff regime in the US seems to have hobbled recent growth, but only modestly.
In fact, for most of the year, Shein has enjoyed healthy monthly spending increases in the US market compared to 2024 levels, according to data from consumer data provider Consumer Edge. Sales dipped 13 percent in May, when tariffs were first announced, only to recover over the summer. Things have slipped since August, when new duties came into full force, but the decline in spending has been in the low single digits, the data show.
The company has told investors it’s expecting bumper profits of $2 billion this year, as price hikes and cost-cutting helped boost margins, according to Bloomberg. Sales are forecast to see a percentage increase in the mid-teens compared to last year, the newswire reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The upbeat outlook was reportedly shared in August.
A ban on third-party sales in France could carry more financial risk, but it remains to be seen how long that will last.
The stakes are certainly high; French lawmakers are pushing Brussels to also investigate the sale of sex dolls and banned weapons on Shein’s marketplace.
The Bottom Line: I’m not putting away the popcorn just yet.
TeMiu Miu and Luxury’s Quality Crisis
About a month ago, influencer Tiffany Kim bought a $2,000 viral grey fleece from Miu Miu. Two wears later, one of the elastics responsible for a pleasing ruching effect around the cuffs fell off, Kim told her near-400,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok last week.
“Objectively so cute, very comfortable,” Kim said, while holding up the jacket in the video. “But it’s kind of giving Columbia, and Columbia probably has better quality than this.”
In luxury land, that is what one might call a “sick burn.”
This is not the first time Miu Miu has been called out for quality issues in the last couple of months, either. In September, content creator Wisdom Kaye posted a series of videos about a Miu Miu haul that started to fall apart the minute he got home. In one video with 11 million views, he unboxes a hoodie and vest the brand sent to replace previous faulty products, only for a button to pop off as he’s inspecting one of the items.
“Unbefuckinglievable,” Kaye exclaims. It’s hard not to agree.
Miu Miu said the incidents represented unfortunate, isolated issues that don’t reflect the overall quality of its products. The proportion of sales returned each month because of defects ranges between 0.2 and 0.3 percent, according to the company. The recent cases highlighted on social media were carefully handled by its client services team to provide repairs or refunds as appropriate, it added.
The Bigger Picture
Products that sell for thousands of dollars should not suffer from basic quality issues. But increasingly, customers are taking to social media to claim they do.
The issue has become so big, especially when paired with eye-popping price hikes, that it’s credited as one reason for luxury’s downturn over the last few years. Intriguingly, Miu Miu is a brand so hot right now that it’s bucked this broader market malaise. It will be interesting to see if the public airing of quality concerns has any impact on sales going forward.
These kinds of quality issues are also bad from a sustainability point of view. Obviously. Products that fall apart after just a few wears create more waste and encourage more consumption, which means more pollution.
In fact, the luxury sector routinely lobs allegations of poor quality at lower-priced brands as a way to deflect questions about its own environmental impact, even though its rapid growth since the 2010s has rested in part on the increasing mass production of products of dubious caliber, simply at a much higher price point. Still, high-end brands continue to pitch their pricey products as timeless and stitched to last generations, conveniently ignoring the fact that from a durability perspective you’re really going to struggle to design something to last longer than polyester.
This isn’t just an abstract issue, either. The luxury sector has lobbied to include “emotional durability” in eco-labelling rules that would govern how brands can rate the environmental impact of their products. The concept is a little murky, but ultimately it’s a way to penalise brands that churn out high volumes of low-cost clothes designed to encourage over-consumption. Of course, it does little to take into account the huge advertising budgets luxury labels lavish on convincing their customers to replace last season’s “timeless” handbag with their latest drop.
Tell me Something I Don’t Know
Yes, I get it, this conversation is one that’s been going on for a while, and I don’t know if we’ll ultimately reach a tipping point where luxury customers really start demanding better from their brands.
But I do contrast the complaints I see about luxury’s quality and customer service with an experience I had early last year, when a pair of comparatively modestly priced woven On sneakers I had purchased a few months previously developed a small hole in the tippy toe.
I sent the brand a picture of the issue and a copy of the receipt. They sent me a pair of replacement shoes. I’m happy to report they are still going strong.
Is the Future 3D Printed?
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s one of Nike’s newest shoes, a futuristic 3D-printed take on the Air Max 95 set to hit stores later this month.
As our resident sneaker expert, Mike Sykes, broke down earlier this week, this is not the first time the industry has leaned into the idea that 3D printing could revolutionise fashion. But in the past, the trend hasn’t really taken off.
As Mike writes:
The industry has been here before. Sneaker brands were enthusiastic participants in the 3D printing boom of the mid-2010s, when the technology seemed poised to shake up manufacturing of everything from fashion to airplane parts and prosthetic limbs. That dream faded: in most cases, 3D printers proved too slow, expensive and finicky for mass production.
But the technology has moved on in the last decade, consumers are in the market for something new and exciting and more flexible materials make the 2025 crop of 3D-printed sneakers a much more comfortable wear than hard-shelled earlier models.
So what?
Were this shift to scale and stick, it would also mean good things from a sustainability perspective.
Shoes are notoriously hard to recycle (even compared to textiles, which are certainly no picnic). They’re made up of a plethora of materials, stuck, sewn and fused together using a further array of processes, glues and threads. All those pieces need to be disassembled, separated and the materials in them correctly identified to make recycling really effective.
At best, at the moment, sneakers are simply shredded to create low-level materials that can be used in things like insulation and soft flooring for playgrounds.
But this is no silver bullet
Obviously. These are fashion shoes, not performance runners and there’s unlikely to be a wholesale shift to 3D printing any time soon.
The new models are largely made with thermoplastic polyurethane, a fossil-fuel-based material commonly used to create midsoles and outsoles in traditional sneakers.The manufacturing process means 3D printed models typically use less material, but these are still plastic products, with all the environmental challenges which accompany that.
What Else You Need to Know This Week:
- The Human Cost of Trump’s Tariffs: BoF reporter Shayeza Walid unpacks her recent story on how America’s trade war is hitting garment workers in India on this week’s episode of The Debrief. [The Business of Fashion]
- An “Impossible Challenge”: Rising temperatures are threatening worker health and factory productivity in many of fashion’s biggest manufacturing hubs.The industry hasn’t figured out how to adapt. [Sourcing Journal]
- Climate Breakdown: Global temperatures are on track to rise an average of 2.8C under existing government policies, according to the UN’s latest analysis. The findings indicate that “the path to a liveable future gets steeper every day,” UN secretary general António Guterres said. [Financial Times]
Editor’s Note: This article was amended on Nov. 7, 2025, to include data on Miu Miu’s post-purchase return rates.