What if America really stopped importing fast fashion? Pros and cons of Trump's tariffs on Made-in-Asia-American fashion

As if life were not already complex for workers in the fast fashion industry, constantly crushed by pressures such as meager wages (often accompanied by cases of wage theft), exhausting hours, and unsafe working conditions due also to pesticides and other chemicals used in factories and plantations, a new problem has recently emerged. In a new article from Vox, journalist Sara Herschander questions the future of garment workers in India now that Trump has imposed 50% tariffs on imports from the country. Since the American tariffs came into effect, Herschander writes, the factories that are part of India’s “textile belt” have almost completely shut down. Working shifts have decreased and, consequently, the suicide rate among cotton farmers, an already widespread phenomenon in the country, is rising. If American brands were to stop producing in Asia, discouraged by prices that are now too high compared to before, what future awaits the fast fashion sector and its workers in India, as well as in Vietnam and Bangladesh?

Among the American brands that have suffered the greatest impact on their imports due to Trump’s tariffs are Gap, Lululemon, Nike (which mainly works with Vietnamese factories), H&M, Inditex (Zara, Mango), and Primark, but also Levi’s, which commissions jeans in Lesotho, southern Africa. Although the working conditions of those in the fast fashion industry could still improve, much of the socio-economic progress achieved in East Asia since the early 2000s - when clothing brands discovered it was cheaper to produce in India rather than in China, for example - is precisely due to the fast fashion sector. Small but consistent milestones that, if the collaboration between factories and major brands were to end, could be lost forever. In India and Vietnam, the education rate of the population has increased, and the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has decreased, also thanks to jobs provided by supply chains. Not to mention that in this industry, it is often women who are hired as seamstresses or weavers, an opportunity that is no small thing for a gender that still struggles to assert itself and achieve independence in less developed countries.

The effects of American tariffs on fast fashion are already visible. In the past four months, exports from India have dropped by 40%. After China, India currently represents the most important country in the world for textile production, a status that could vanish into thin air, along with all the progress achieved by workers in the sector, if the tariffs remain in place. Thousands of farmers and agricultural workers have now taken to the streets to protest against the tariffs and the Indian government’s decision not to intervene. The future of fast fashion and of the hands that create it is now in Trump and Modi’s hands. Which, we might add, does not bode well.