Yale Student Conversations and Insights: Sustainable Fashion Policy, Resale, and Brand Accountability

This student-focused seminar, hosted by the Sustainable Fashion Consumption Research Network, featured three Yale students:Maya Caine, Chloe Edwards, and Lauren Linham. They presented research and entrepreneurial work at the intersection of fashion, policy, and circular economy. Dr. Katia Vladimir Dian, deputy mayor and chief research officer at Postgrowth Fashion Agency, joined as respondent and discussant. 

Reimagining Resale: Helix (Maya Caine )

Maya opened by framing a problem that most people overlook: resale, widely celebrated as fashion's circular solution, may not actually be reducing consumption. Drawing on network research, she noted that people who buy secondhand tend to also buy more new clothing, suggesting that resale operates within the same extractive logic as fast fashion rather than replacing it. Large digital resale platforms strip garments of meaning, reduce clothing to anonymous commodities, and extract revenue from local fashion economies without reinvesting in them.

Her response was Helix, a social enterprise she co-founded with her twin sister to reimagine resale around three principles. First, turning garments into living archives by letting users attach memories and stories to clothing that transfer with each new owner, drawing on provenance theory to make the ordinary feel meaningful. Second, anchoring fashion in local exchange by keeping clothes circulating within cities rather than shipping them across the country, and integrating local care services like tailoring, mending, and laundering directly into the platform. Third, introducing an infinite commission model where the original lister earns a percentage every time a garment is resold or rented, decoupling revenue from new production and creating financial incentives for longevity. Helix takes a 10% fee per transaction, split between buyer and seller, significantly lower than competitors like Poshmark. The platform is also structured as a cooperative, with the goal of transferring up to 51% ownership to its member community over time.

France's Anti-Fast Fashion Law and US Replicability (Chloe Edwards)

Chloe is writing a research paper analyzing France's national anti-fast fashion law and what a US federal equivalent might look like. The French law, which she is translating in full given that only partial translations currently exist, focuses heavily on marketing language, taxing fast fashion brands selling in France, and targeting ultra-fast fashion companies, widely understood to mean Shein specifically. She traced how the law built on prior French legislation around climate resilience and circular economy, including a notable repair subsidy initiative that incentivized consumers to bring clothing to professionals for mending rather than discarding it.

In the US, the closest analogs are the New York Fashion Act, still unpassed, and a California bill it was modeled on, which both focused on supply chain transparency and EPR. Chloe noted that a key difference between the French and American contexts is cultural: fashion is deeply tied to French national identity and the luxury sector is a significant economic driver, which makes sustainability legislation easier to frame as economically beneficial and culturally protective. Getting similar legislation passed in the US requires navigating a very different political landscape, where industry lobbying and the absence of a comparable cultural stake in fashion make progress harder.

Textile Waste EPR and Brand Accountability (Lauren Linham)

Lauren offered the most policy-technical presentation, arguing that the fashion industry's core problem is not just one of waste but of responsibility, and that EPR legislation is fundamentally reshaping how that responsibility is assigned. She traced the shift from voluntary sustainability frameworks, which allow the least responsible actors to simply opt out, toward mandatory legal obligations with real enforcement mechanisms.

She walked through the three US legislative examples in detail. California is the only state with an enacted EPR law for textiles, with penalties of $50,000 per day for non-compliance. New York's bill remains pending, with comparatively lower penalties of $500 per day. Both use a cascading liability structure: if there is no manufacturer, liability moves to the brand owner, then the importer, then the distributor, ensuring someone in the chain is always accountable. Both also include a secondhand exemption, creating a structural incentive for brands investing in resale and circular models.

Lauren argued that the most consequential enforcement mechanism is not financial penalties but market bans. Non-compliant companies can lose access to California and New York markets, the two largest apparel markets in the US and globally influential fashion capitals. For most brands, that revenue risk dwarfs any per-day fine. She closed by noting that EPR compliance cannot sit in a legal silo; it needs to touch supply chain contracts, commercial strategy, and distribution monitoring, especially as third-party marketplace sales complicate brand visibility over how their products move through the market.

Expert Response: Katia (Vladimirova) Dayan

Katia offered substantive feedback across all three presentations. For Maya, she highlighted the framing around city resilience as genuinely powerful, noting that policy makers and elected officials respond to language around resilience and social innovation far more than to conversations about shared wardrobes or affordable clothing. She also offered practical advice on working at the municipal level, distinguishing between cities and communes, and suggesting that mid-sized cities with multiple communes are more tractable starting points than large metros. She was candid about how difficult it is to work from inside government, noting that elected officials operate under far more political constraints than outside observers tend to assume.

For Chloe, she encouraged deeper engagement with the French cultural context, sharing the origin story of the law: a young deputy who ordered from Shein, had the products chemically tested, and found alarming levels of formaldehyde and BPA, then posted about it on social media. In France, that framing landed immediately. She suggested that understanding why that cultural and political context made the law possible is as important as analyzing the law itself, and that the comparison with the more individualistic US context is one of the paper's most interesting angles.

For Lauren, she was direct: publish it. She noted that the field loses a lot when researchers wait until legislation is fully implemented before writing about it, and that a snapshot of this regulatory moment has real value. She also acknowledged that tracking regulations across jurisdictions is genuinely chaotic, with working groups that often do not communicate with each other, and suggested the Global Fashion Agenda as one of the more reliable resources for staying current.

Watch the webinar here:
Fashion Consumption Conversations: Insights from Yale students