Last week, a series of regulations and rulings from authorities in Europe and the U.S. showed where fashion is heading. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Glossy Podcast for interviews with fashion industry leaders and Week in Review episodes, and the Glossy Beauty Podcast for interviews from the beauty industry. –Danny Parisi, sr. fashion reporter
Rulings and regulations
Multiple court rulings and legislative votes in Europe last week are set to have a big impact on fashion.
First, the European Parliament voted on a new law called the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. The law requires companies operating within Europe to monitor their supply chains for the use of forced labor and negative environmental impacts and to correct any violations that arise.
The supply chain, as defined in the directive, includes “upstream” partners, like suppliers, farms and material refiners, as well as “downstream” partners, like delivery, shipping and fulfillment businesses. In short, companies will be required to have a much deeper insight into their own supply chains than they’ve had before.
Multiple brands over the years have shared with me the difficulty of achieving this. While you can control your own actions, it’s not always easy to get full insight into those of third-party partners, especially if they’re located in other parts of the world. But, as the ancient legal principle holds, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Brands must have deeper knowledge of their partners’ workings along the supply chain if they want to live up to their own sustainability goals — and avoid a hefty E.U. fine.
Speaking of hefty E.U. fines, Italian authorities fined Amazon over $10 million last week for what it called anticompetitive practices. Specifically, the regulator took issue with Amazon’s “subscribe and save” recurring purchase options. The option is preselected, requiring customers to manually opt out of setting up a recurring purchase.
This comes six months after the FTC in the U.S. sued Amazon for similar anticompetitive practices in a lawsuit involving 17 different state attorneys general. That suit, filed in Seattle, is ongoing.
But perhaps the most impactful bit of regulation introduced last week involved Google. The company announced last week that it was delaying its plan to phase out its use of cookies in Google Chrome until next year. Cookies, which let advertisers track users across sites, are a contentious topic among privacy activists, and Google has been planning to phase them out for years.
But for now, cookies will live another day. Google said it’s still in discussion with regulators, including the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority, on the best way to implement the phaseout. While cookies are eventually going away, brands have at least another year to figure out what they’ll do without them.
