Made to Last,
Until It Didn't Sell

Three luxury brands. Three public exposures. One pattern that a new EU regulation is trying to break. And the older, simpler idea the brands borrowed but never kept.

There is a version of responsible consumption that feels like it should work. You stop buying cheap things that fall apart. You save up for something better. You buy the Coach bag, or the Burberry coat, because the brand has spent decades telling you that quality is its own form of sustainability: buy it once, take care of it, keep it for years. It is an old idea, older than any luxury brand. My grandfather kept things until they wore out. He did not call it sustainability. He called it common sense. The brands borrowed that logic and built a marketing proposition around it. As it turns out, they only borrowed part of it. In October 2021, a TikTok video showed a pile of Coach handbags retrieved from a Dallas dumpster, every one of them deliberately slashed before disposal. In 2018, Burberry's annual report revealed the company had incinerated £28.6 million worth of unsold clothing, accessories, and perfume in a single year. This July, a Hong Kong High Court trial disclosed that Chanel destroys between 10,000 and 20,000 products every six months at a single warehouse, a process systematic enough to require a dedicated shredding facility, a security passcode, and a freight elevator between floors. These are not anomalies. They are the other half of the business model the brands never advertised: the premium you paid was real, but what it bought was a perception of scarcity, not a guarantee that the object would be treated as something worth keeping.

Scarcity Was the Product

To understand why luxury brands destroy unsold goods, you have to understand what they are actually selling. A Coach bag at full retail and the same bag on a TJ Maxx markdown rack are physically identical objects. What is different is the story attached to them. Luxury pricing depends on that story remaining intact, which means it depends on certain versions of the object not existing in certain places. A surplus bag that reaches a discount channel does not just cost the brand a margin on that unit. It undermines the perceived value of every full-price unit still on the shelf. Destruction, from the brand's perspective, is not waste. It is inventory management. It is the cost of maintaining a fiction that the object is rare.

Burberry disclosed this logic plainly in its 2018 annual report, in a line that a journalist at The Times spotted and turned into a global scandal within 48 hours. The company had destroyed goods worth £28.6 million in the previous year, up from £26.9 million the year before. The practice was not new. What was new was that someone read the footnote. By September 2018, Burberry had announced it would stop. The reform was real. It was also reactive.

Coach's version of the same logic became visible through a different channel. In October 2021, environmental activist Anna Sacks, known on TikTok as @thetrashwalker, posted a video unboxing Coach handbags she had purchased from another influencer who had retrieved them from bins outside a Dallas mall. Every bag had been deliberately slashed, rendering it unusable. The video reached nearly three million views within days. Coach responded within the week, announcing it had ceased destroying in-store returns and launching its (Re)Loved repair and resale program. Again: the reform was real. Again: it followed the exposure, not preceded it.

The Chanel case, still unfolding in a Hong Kong High Court as of this writing, arrived with unusual specificity. Two former warehouse employees are on trial for allegedly stealing 724 handbags and leather goods that had been earmarked for destruction. Court testimony described the disposal process in detail: products moved from the 23rd floor of the Goodman Interlink facility in Tsing Yi to a fifth-floor shredding facility, via a freight elevator accessible only by security passcode. Prosecutors stated that Chanel Hong Kong destroys between 10,000 and 20,000 discontinued products every six months. Chanel responded to the disclosures by stating that the figures do not reflect its current global practices, and pointed to L'Atelier des Matières, its circular materials hub launched in 2025, as evidence of its evolved approach. The response followed the exposure by one week.

The Reform
That Follows the Camera

The pattern across all three brands is identical, and it is worth naming directly. Burberry reformed after a journalist read a footnote. Coach reformed after a TikTok video went viral. Chanel announced the evolution of its practices after a criminal trial put the specifics on court record. None of these reforms were announced before the visibility arrived. Each one came after.

That pattern is not unique to fashion. Industries tend to reform their most uncomfortable practices when those practices become public in a form that generates sustained attention. What is specific to luxury fashion is the particular shape of the contradiction: these are brands whose entire value proposition rests on the idea that they make things carefully, treat materials with respect, and produce objects worth keeping. The destruction is not just environmentally wasteful. It is a refutation of the brand's own central claim.

The consumer who bought the Coach bag to avoid the fast fashion cycle was not wrong about the underlying logic. My grandfather's common sense remains sound. What was wrong was the assumption that a brand charging premium prices had made the same commitment to the object that the price implied.

The Regulation That Arrived
Eight Years Later

France legislated against the destruction of unsold goods in 2022, two years after Burberry's scandal and one year after Coach's. The French law, the Anti-Gaspillage pour une Economie Circulaire, covered textiles among other categories. On July 19, 2026, the European Union's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation extended similar rules across all 27 member states. Large companies are now prohibited from destroying unsold apparel, clothing accessories, and footwear. Medium-sized companies follow in 2030.

The regulation arrived, in the same week, as the Chanel trial testimony was making headlines. That timing was not coordinated, but it is clarifying. Eight years passed between Burberry's disclosed incineration and continent-wide law. The interval tells you something about how long institutional change takes to follow public outrage, even when the outrage is genuine and the harm is visible.

The EU regulation is a meaningful step. It is also, by itself, incomplete in two specific ways. First, its enforcement depends on companies accurately declaring goods as damaged, contaminated, or otherwise exempt, categories broad enough to accommodate creative compliance. Greenpeace noted shortly after the regulation took effect that companies could circumvent it through misdeclaration, and that without consistent monitoring the ban risked becoming, in their words, a paper tiger. Second, and more fundamentally, the regulation addresses what happens to unsold goods. It does not address why there are so many unsold goods in the first place.

The Difference Between
Propping and Building

When Coach launched (Re)Loved in 2021, it built something genuinely useful. By fiscal year 2024, the program had repaired 91,000 items and given over 14,000 a second life through resale. Chanel's L'Atelier des Matières, capitalized at between 50 and 80 million euros, processes end-of-life materials into recycled components used in new products. These are circular fashion responses, and they are real. They are not, however, slow fashion.

The distinction matters and is worth being clear about. Circular fashion intervenes after production decisions are already made. It asks: what do we do with what we have made, and what cannot be sold? It extends the life of existing objects, which is valuable. It does not question how many objects were made in the first place. A brand can run a robust resale and repair program while continuing to produce at volumes that guarantee significant surplus every season. The surplus problem and the resale solution coexist without resolving each other.

Slow fashion asks the earlier question. It asks how much should be made, and whether production can be matched to actual demand rather than manufactured demand. It challenges the model that generates the surplus before the surplus needs managing. The two approaches are not in opposition, but they are not equivalent, and treating circular fashion as a sufficient response to a production volume problem is a category error the industry has been committing for several years with considerable enthusiasm.

What the Brands Borrowed
and What They Left Out

There is something useful in returning to my grandfather's logic here, because it contains both halves of the argument. He kept things until they wore out. That is the slow fashion principle: make fewer things, make them well, keep them long enough that the question of what to do with surplus never arises at scale. But he also repaired things, passed things on, found second uses for materials that had exceeded their first purpose. That is the circular principle. The two were not separate philosophies. They were the same relationship with objects, expressed across a full life cycle.

What the luxury brands borrowed was the first half of that logic, the part that justifies the price. What they left out was the part that follows from it: if the object is genuinely worth what you charged for it, it is worth treating accordingly when it does not sell. The destruction reveals that the commitment to quality was a marketing claim, not a production philosophy. The price was real. The promise behind it was conditional.

A Different Model,
in a Farm Field

The question the EU regulation cannot answer, and the one the circular fashion programs do not address, is whether a different production model is possible at the scale of brands that generate tens of thousands of units of surplus every six months. That question is being answered, slowly and at small scale, in places that do not make the news the way a Hong Kong criminal trial does.

Hudson Valley Sustainable Fashion Week held its fourth annual Organic Runway this September at Stone Ridge Orchard in the Rondout Valley, with nine designers showing collections built from deadstock, reclaimed fiber, and excess studio material. The event holds its participants to a 90-percent-not-new standard, not as a constraint but as a position on what the work is for. There is no surplus problem at HVSFW because there is no overproduction. The model does not generate the waste it then needs to manage.

Fashion Mingle, a B2B platform registered as a United Nations SDG partnership, takes a similar principle to supply chain infrastructure, connecting designers to local and regional manufacturers to reduce the distance between production and demand. The localized supply chain argument is not primarily an environmental one, though the environmental benefits are real. It is an economic one: when production is closer to the market it serves, the information gap that generates surplus narrows. You make less of what will not sell because you know sooner what that is.

Neither HVSFW nor Fashion Mingle is operating at the scale of Coach or Burberry. That is not a criticism. It is a description of where the model currently lives, and where it needs to grow.

Compulsion Reaches Behavior.
It Does Not Reach the Model.

The Chanel trial testimony described a destruction process that required a dedicated facility, a passcode-controlled elevator, and a systematic verification procedure before goods were shredded. That is not a careless practice. That is infrastructure. Infrastructure built to solve a problem that the production model created and the scarcity strategy required.

The EU regulation bans the output of that infrastructure. It does not reach the input: the production decisions, the volume targets, the seasonal surplus that the infrastructure was built to handle. Chanel will find alternatives to shredding, as Burberry and Coach did before it. The alternatives will be circular: resale, repair, materials recovery. The alternatives are better than shredding. They are not a different model. They are a better-managed version of the same one.

My grandfather did not have a resale program or a circular materials hub. He had a different relationship with objects from the beginning, one that started with the question of whether the thing was worth making before it asked what to do with it when it did not sell. The brands borrowed his conclusion. The industry that might actually embody his premise is still being built, nine designers at a time, in a farm field in the Hudson Valley.

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