Who made your clothes? If you shop at H&M, that answer may not be as opaque as it once was. The Swedish fast fashion giant announced this month that “for each of our garments, we now share details such as production country, supplier names, factory names and addresses as well as the number of workers in the factories” in furtherance of an effort to “make it easier for customers to make more informed choices when shopping.” 

Off-White and a New York children’s store have managed to settle their legal differences after the buzzy streetwear label filed suit late last year. According to Off-White’s trademark infringement complaint, Brooklyn-based Brooklyn Lighthouse – which boasts a lineup of popular streetwear items scaled down to fit kids from ages 2 to 10 – was “willfully and in bad faith” selling products that make use of Off-White’s “[trade]marks and/or marks that are confusingly similar to the Off-White [trade]marks and/or are identical or confusingly similar to the Off-White products.” 

The shadowy trade in counterfeit goods has a footprint that reaches from the expanse of the Chinese mainland to ports in the U.S. with everything from replica luxury fashion products and copycat automobiles to fake cigarettes and pharmaceuticals making their way into the consumer marketplace. Of the $1.2-plus trillion global counterfeit industry (a figure that is expected to grow to $1.82 trillion by 2020), the market for counterfeit clothing, textiles, footwear, handbags, cosmetics, and watches, alone, amounted to a whopping $450 billion, and growing. 

On the heels of widespread reports that fashion brands ranging from H&M to Burberry and Louis Vuitton routinely destroy unsold products, a French politician wants to ban such behavior by law. Brune Poirson, the Secretary of State to the Minister for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition, is “drafting a law to prevent companies from destroying unsold clothing,” per WWD, the latest step in an effort first announced last year when French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe introduced fifty proposals aimed at the development of the country's circular economy. 

From the marked increase in the number of garments that consumers purchase each year and the ever-decreasing amount of time before those products are discarded to the greenhouse gas emissions directly linked to the fashion and apparel industries and the reduction targets set by a group of 60 or so United Nations charter signatories, here are a few fast (fashion) facts to consider on Earth Day …

There is nothing to see here, folks, Louis Vuitton essentially asserts in its response to Pooey Puitton and Bratz toy-maker MGA Entertainment’s recently-amended lawsuit. After filing suit against Louis Vuitton late last year in a California federal court, the Isaac Larian-founded MGA filed an amended complaint early this month, seeking to bolster its initial argument that it is in need of court intervention in connection with an “actual, present, and justiciable controversy” at play between itself and Louis Vuitton over with its hot-selling Pooey Puitton toy.  

In 2001, just as peer-to-peer music sharing platform Napster was being shut down following a landmark legal win on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America, version 1.0 of iTunes was being released for the first time (just a few months before the inaugural Apple stores would open their doors in Virginia and Southern California), and as Wikipedia – not the first-ever online encyclopedia, but hands-down the most heavily- and frequently-trafficked – was first finding its footing, Larry Lessig was in the process of founding something headline-making of his own, even if he did not know it at the time. 

Hedi Slimane’s debut offerings for Celine have spawned waiting lists in stores, LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault revealed at the group’s annual shareholders meeting on Thursday. The 50-year old creative made his highly-anticipated debut at Celine in January with a collection of typical short-and-tight, rocker-inspired Slimane fare, which was met with over-arching praise for what would certainly be the cause for commercial success, and at the same time, no shortage of reviews soaked which skepticism due to the seeming lack of evolution in aesthetic compared to the nearly-identical wares he shown during his tenure at rival conglomerate Kering-owned Saint Laurent.   

Deloitte’s annual “Global Powers of Luxury Goods” report pin-pointed and ranked the largest personal luxury goods companies in the world by sales for the year ending June 30, 2018. On the list of the world’s largest purveyors of luxury-level garments, accessories, cosmetics and fragrances (i.e., personal luxury goods), LVMH, Estée Lauder, Richemont, Kering, Luxottica Group, Chanel, L’Oréal Luxe, Swatch Group, Chow Tai Fook Jewellery, and PVH Corp, in that order, took the top spots, with minimal variations from last year’s findings.