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This Thursday, February 5, 2026, the Paris judicial court will rule, on appeal, on Shein’s suspension in France. Blamed for every ill by European textile manufacturers, Shein claims it produces in the same factories as most of its competitors. Do all our clothes really come out of the same factories?
In French fashion, as at the highest level of the State, war has been declared on Shein. This Thursday, February 5, the courts are set to rule on appeal on the government’s request to suspend the platform, after child-abuse sex dolls were put up for sale on its marketplace. At the same time, 17 professional federations have launched legal action for unfair competition against the disposable-fashion giant.
Yet Frédéric Merlin, owner of Société des grands magasins (SGM), which has hosted the Chinese brand since December inside the Paris BHV, won’t budge: working with Shein is no less “ethical” than working with its competitors. “Whether this assembly likes it or not, the reality is that the factories that manufacture for Shein are exactly the same ones that manufacture for all the ‘mass market retailers’ in France,” he told the National Assembly on November 26, 2025.
That same day, Pierre-François Le Louët, co-president of the French Fashion and Apparel Industries Union, responded on Figaro TV: “That’s false. They are not the same factories, and obviously not the same workshops.”
Subcontracting, the watchword of the textile economy
While a clear-cut answer is hard to give, the debate at least has the merit of putting a central question on the table: what do we really know about how our clothes are made? Today, 95% of the clothing worn by the French comes from abroad, according to the Alliance du commerce. Kiabi, the French people’s favorite brand, is certainly growing its production in Turkey and Eastern Europe, but it still manufactures the vast majority of its items in Southeast Asia, particularly in China and Bangladesh – a country whose textile sector accounts for 80% of exports.
For Decathlon, the third most popular brand in France, also owned by the Mulliez group, the pattern is the same: two-thirds of production in Asia, with a few production sites based in Europe and Africa. Other mid-range French brands, such as those of the SMCP group (Sandro, Maje, Claudie Pierlot), say they are focusing on partially relocating their operations and report producing 23% of their items in Europe, 30% in the Mediterranean basin, and 47% in Asia.
In textiles, the watchword is subcontracting. A product of history.
As early as the 19th century, clothing was among the first industries to globalize its supply chain and lean heavily on the division of labor, leading to an ever more abundant and cheap supply. Two centuries later, brands from the Old Continent have completely abandoned garment production, focusing instead on design creation, marketing, and product sales.
Shein and Kiabi: same factories, same secrets?
The various links in the manufacturing chain are thus delegated to a cascade of suppliers that the industry classifies as tier 1, 2, or 3, depending on whether they handle garment assembly, buying fabric from a spinning mill, dyeing it, or supplying fibers from traders, ginners, or cotton growers, and so on. The further upstream a supplier’s stage falls, the harder it becomes to trace.
Questioned by La Croix, Kiabi states that “to its knowledge,” it shares “no tier-1 assembly supplier (under direct contract with the company, ed.) with Shein, with the exception of a single supplier specializing in belt manufacturing.” It is harder to know more about tiers 2 and 3. “Obviously it’s possible that Shein could have workshops and suppliers in common with giants like H&M, or French brands such as Kiabi and Decathlon,” says MP Anne-Cécile Violland (Horizons), rapporteur of the bill aimed at reducing the textile industry’s environmental impact.
But according to Shein’s opponents, what’s at stake is not just where the clothes are made, but also the conditions under which they are produced. “The gap between the production standards of French and European brands and those of Shein is abysmal,” says Bernard Cherqui, CEO of Mondial Tissus and president of the Alliance du commerce.
Guangzhou, capital of ultra-fast fashion
French brand Kiabi relies on mass clothing production spread across six annual collections; its European competitors, such as Ireland’s Primark, Sweden’s H&M, or Spain’s Zara, can go as high as 36 collections a year. In this model known as fast fashion, orders, prices, and deadlines are set in advance so that manufacturers can in turn organize themselves with their subcontractors.
It’s the brands that impose their conditions on the factories to secure low prices,” explains Marie Nguyen, co-founder of We Dress Fair, a company committed to eco-responsible fashion. “So, to achieve economies of scale, the subcontractor inevitably cuts corners on human rights in countries where minimum social standards are not respected.
This system, accepted and now standard in the textile industry, has been pushed to the extreme by Shein through its self-proclaimed business model: on-demand production. Unlike its European competitors, whose model still relies on planned collections, the Chinese giant launches 7,000 new items every day. These are initially produced in very small quantities. Powered by artificial intelligence, its algorithms analyze sales and trends in real time; when an item takes off, the company switches to mass production in under a week.
A European reporter was able to visit Shein’s “factory villages” in the streets of Guangzhou, a stronghold of Chinese manufacturing. It is here, more than 8,000 kilometers from France, in huge tiled buildings lining streets crammed with textile workshops, that Shein reveals its true face. He told La Croix: “There are thousands of small businesses, each equipped with a computer displaying Shein’s orders in real time. The workshop manager can accept or decline the order, depending on whether he thinks he can produce it in time. Shein’s system really is like Uber’s, but for clothes.
Disposable fashion, sustainable exploitation
The pace imposed by this model, along with the low prices of the items offered by the Chinese brand – around €7 in France – puts pressure on foremen and, in turn, on workers, who report being paid between €0.06 and €0.27 per piece, depending on the complexity of the task.
Shein claims 7,200 contracted suppliers (workshops from which the company buys its finished products directly), compared with 949 for Decathlon and its sports equipment, or 183 for Kiabi and its clothing. Such a fragmentation of production across a myriad of subcontractors inevitably hampers the monitoring of social, environmental, and health standards.
In July 2025, the publication of the report “Disposable Fashion, Sustainable Exploitation” by the NGOs ActionAid and China Labor Watch revealed that human rights violations were still ongoing in Guangzhou. “While Shein refines its media narrative, workers continue to pay the heavy price of its business model: large-scale exploitation, gender discrimination, and a lack of social protection,” the report states.
Shein is Uber or Deliveroo for clothes
For its part, the Chinese company, now headquartered in Singapore, states it has zero tolerance on three central points: “Child labor, forced labor, and refusal to submit to an independent audit.”
“We encourage organizations such as China Labor Watch and ActionAid to engage directly with us, to share their findings (…) in order to understand the full context. We regret that, to date, they have chosen not to do so,” the company told La Croix.
Enough to enrage the heads of French brands. “They are incapable of ensuring the traceability of their clothes, they manufacture like a Deliveroo platform. Shein is like the kebab shop down the street that can’t say where its meat comes from,” fumes the head of a ready-to-wear brand.
Quite happy to have a ready-made enemy, are European brands really any more virtuous? “Their model has only slightly improved since the Rana Plaza disaster (which killed 1,100 people in Bangladesh, ed.) in 2013,” says Sandrine Zerbib, former president of Adidas’s Chinese division, bluntly.
By combing through the documentation of the world’s 250 largest brands, Fashion Revolution’s 2023 transparency report exposed the industry’s main blind spot: supply chain traceability. On this specific criterion, Zara scored 11/100, for example, Decathlon only 1/100, while Kiabi and Sandro posted the same score as Shein, the lowest possible: 0/100.
Transparency on the shelf, behind the scenes
This blindness, whether deliberate or not, can backfire on the brands themselves. As happened in 2025, when an investigation by the outlet Disclose accused French sporting giant Decathlon of working with Chinese subcontractors involved in the forced labor of Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic group. The brand denied the allegations. “The problem is systemic: sometimes brands can themselves be victims of the lack of transparency among the workshops they work with,” explains Marie Nguyen.
“We run into enormous opacity as soon as we try to trace how our clothes are manufactured abroad,” says MP Anne-Cécile Violland, who would like a parliamentary inquiry committee to be opened on the subject.
Since 2023, things have gradually been changing. The anti-waste law for a circular economy (AGEC) now requires brands to state the countries of origin for the garment’s last three manufacturing stages, as well as the presence of recycled material, hazardous substances, microplastic fibers, and recyclability.
Reshoring for greater clarity?
On Sandro’s website, for example, a few clicks are now enough to learn that this velvet shirt from the winter 2026 collection contains 35% recycled material, was dyed and woven in Italy, then sewn in Bulgaria. This feature is made possible by its partnership with the French start-up Fairly Made, which began collecting data on the textile industry in 2018.
“We review the audit information and certificates available for all suppliers, right back to fiber production, and provide them to our clients,” explains Laure Betsch, one of the co-founders. The company works with around a hundred retailers, including LVMH, Leclerc, and SMCP.
To break with the opacity of this fragmented sector, eco-responsible brands argue that production chains above all need to be shortened by relocating them. But this return to the Old Continent can only happen on condition of “reducing volumes to ensure decent working conditions,” Marie Nguyen stresses. Getting to know our clothes better requires slowing down the pace.