New York governor Kathy Hochul finished 2024 by signing the Fashion Workers Act into law. The pro-labour bill will give models access to workplace protection and introduce tighter regulation to the management companies that represent them, meaning change is on its way for how the modelling industry operates.
Hochul signed the Act into law just ahead of the 24 December deadline, and the legislation will go into effect in June 2025. The bill, which was first introduced in 2022 and had previously gotten stuck in regulatory procedures, passed the State Senate in May 2024 and the State Assembly in June.
The win comes off the back of years of campaigning by New York-based advocacy group The Model Alliance, which co-sponsors the bill alongside New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Assembly Member Karines Reyes, led by founder and executive director Sara Ziff, who started work as a model in New York at 14 years old. “I saw up close the way in which the massive power imbalance between models and their management agencies led directly to sexual abuse,” she says. “When I started speaking out and organising my peers, I was treated like a pariah. We had a lot of structural sexism to overcome, but I knew we were right and our concerns were legitimate.”
The law will grant models access to deal memos and contracts with the agencies and brands they work with; increased transparency regarding their expenses and payments; safeguards against harassment; and protections against the misuse of AI. Model management companies will be required to be registered with the state – the avoidance of which to date has enabled these companies to exploit aspiring models. In essence, the law will guarantee a system of checks and balances which has long been lacking.
“I fully support the goals of this legislation to provide protections for fashion workers, who have too often been subject to unfair working conditions or been exploited in the workplace,” Hochul said in the bill’s approval memo. “However, changes are necessary to clarify the duties of model management companies and brands to ensure they engage in contract transparency, as well as provide a safe and non-exploitive working environment for models.”
It’s a win for transparency in the notoriously shadowy world of modelling. Shermin Lakha, founder of Lvlup Legal, says that agencies previously did not have to disclose models’ earnings to the models themselves; now, agency fees will be curbed to 20 per cent of earnings. “As the world of fashion and content creation has expanded into a multi-billion dollar industry, there has been very little exposure on what agencies are earning versus what they are paying models and creators,” she says.
Agencies conducting business in New York will have six months to ensure they comply with the new law. “If agencies are already acting in the best interests of their models and being financially transparent, this shouldn’t be too difficult,” Ziff says.
Over the next six months, agencies will have to conduct a review of their standard model contracts to ensure that they comply with the Act, says Susan Scafidi, founder and director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham Law School. (Scafidi was a founding board member of Model Alliance.) This involves revising standard agreements and streamlining disclosure and consent procedures.
The Act will also give models more leeway to exit current agency agreements, Lakha says. “I have had several clients attempt to terminate their agency deals, but they are met with long sunset clauses and additional penalties,” she says. “This law allows the model to terminate at any time for any reason, and limits the term to three years.”
Going into 2025, the Model Alliance will run an education and awareness campaign so that models understand their new rights under the law and how to exercise them.
A timely win
Prior to the bill’s passing, Ziff urged Hochul to sign the Fashion Workers Act before the Trump Administration regains control in an op ed for The Daily News. “While the Trump administration promises to elevate alleged sexual predators to cabinet positions and throw away basically all national labor standards and enforcement, Gov. Hochul has an opportunity to deliver workers’ rights for our community of predominantly young, immigrant women and girls who work or aspire to work in the fashion industry by signing the Fashion Workers Act,” she wrote.
There was cause for concern, experts agree. “The Trump Administration calls for less government, enforcement and policy when it comes to private businesses,” Lakha says. “Therefore, it may not have passed once the Trump Administration gained control.”
The now-passed law will also safeguard workers at the state level from any changes in regulation at the national level. “We can all but guarantee that the incoming federal administration will try to roll back protections for the most marginalised,” Ziff says. “That’s why passing pro-worker legislation on the state level is more important now than ever.”
This highlights the necessity of other state level industry bills, including New York’s Fashion Act (which implements measures that require brands to do due diligence on sustainability and human rights fronts in a bid to shift the industry away from the race to the bottom). “Absolutely nobody will thrive unless there are parameters for what is acceptable treatment of nature and people,” Erin Allweiss, co-founder of communications agency No. 29, told Vogue Business in May of the need for legislation like the Fashion Act to pass.
Scafidi doesn’t anticipate much new federal regulation targeting the fashion industry over the next couple of years, but says that additional state regulation pertaining to employment or the environment is possible – especially in California and New York, where the US fashion industry is concentrated.
Though Ziff is relieved to have the law locked in place ahead of 20 January, it highlights how few protections were in place for models prior to 2025. “There’s something a little absurd about celebrating these wins that most other workers already enjoy – newfound rights like being able to see your own contract in a language that you understand,” she says. “But that’s how low the bar has been up to this point, and these rights are long overdue.”
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Correction: The bill only explicitly covers models, not influencers and content creators as the article previously stated. A previous version of the bill was more expansive. The Fashion Law Institute was not a co-founder of Model Alliance as previously reported.
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