California Just Released Proof That Amazon Forced Levi’s and Hanes to Raise Prices at Walmart. The Fashion Industry Should Pay Close Attention.
On April 20, 2026, California Attorney General Rob Bonta released a largely unredacted version of a preliminary injunction filing in the state’s 2022 antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. What is in those documents is not subtle.
Internal emails show Amazon identifying products listed at lower prices on competitor websites like Walmart and Target, contacting its vendors, and instructing them to get those prices raised. The vendors complied. In some cases, they complied within hours. Fashion brands Levi Strauss and Hanes are named specifically in the filing.
California says this is price-fixing. Amazon says the state is misreading legal, pro-consumer conduct. A preliminary injunction hearing is set for July 23, 2026, and trial is scheduled for January 19, 2027 in San Francisco Superior Court.
Here is what the documents actually show, and why it matters for every fashion brand selling through Amazon right now.
What Amazon allegedly did
Amazon controls somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of US e-commerce. About 80 percent of its sales run through the Buy Box, which is the prominent “Buy Now” button that determines which seller wins a given product listing. Losing the Buy Box is not a minor inconvenience. For brands that depend on Amazon for meaningful revenue, it is effectively losing the sale.
According to the unredacted filing, Amazon deployed three distinct methods to keep prices elevated across the internet. In one method, Amazon used its shared vendor relationship as a go-between, arranging for a price increase on a competitor’s site so that Amazon would not have to match the lower price itself. In another, Amazon threatened to suppress or remove the Buy Box from a product until the pricing discrepancy was resolved. In a third, Amazon directly instructed vendors to contact competing retailers and demand they raise their prices.
The filing details more than 15 documented instances across multiple product categories, including clothing, pet food, eye drops, fertiliser, and household goods.
The Levi’s email chain
The most specific fashion example in the filing involves Levi Strauss and a pair of khaki trousers.
Levi’s Easy Khaki Classic fit trousers were listed on Walmart.com at between $25.47 and $26.99. Amazon’s preferred retail price was $29.99. Amazon sent Levi Strauss a link to the Walmart listing and expressed that it hoped the discrepancy could be resolved within a few days.
The following day, a Levi Strauss employee confirmed that Walmart had raised the price to $29.99. Amazon acknowledged the increase and matched the higher price on its own platform.
The filing describes this not as an isolated incident but as a representative example of a pattern that ran across years and product categories. As the unredacted court document states: “When faced with a competitor offering a lower price, Amazon does not compete fairly. Instead, Amazon insulates itself from competition by strong-arming its vendors into raising prices offered by its competitors.”
The Hanes example
Hanes was sent links showing lower prices on both Walmart and Target. The company confirmed it had reached out to both retailers to have the prices increased. The filing records Hanes confirming this in writing.
Neither Levi’s nor Hanes responded to requests for comment from media.
The legal theory
California is arguing that what Amazon did constitutes price-fixing under state antitrust law. The specific legal concept here is resale price maintenance, which is the practice of a manufacturer or platform setting minimum prices at which its products can be sold downstream. Resale price maintenance has a complicated history in US antitrust law. It was treated as illegal per se for most of the 20th century. In 2007, the US Supreme Court ruled in Legergin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS that it should instead be judged under the rule of reason, meaning courts weigh competitive harms against potential benefits case by case.
California is making the argument that what Amazon did goes beyond resale price maintenance into outright horizontal price-fixing, because it allegedly coordinated pricing between competing retailers (Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and others) through a common intermediary. Horizontal price-fixing between competitors is still treated as per se illegal. That is a much harder claim for Amazon to defend.
The filing says: “These are not general discussions about price. These are explicit agreements to increase retail prices, all so Amazon can maintain its profit margins at the expense of consumers.”
Amazon is not alone in the dock
This is not the only case. In September 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states filed a separate federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon in the Western District of Washington, with similar allegations about monopoly power and its effects on merchants. That case goes to trial in March 2027 in Seattle. The District of Columbia Attorney General has a separate case scheduled for May 2027.
Three antitrust trials involving Amazon’s pricing practices are now lined up for 2027. Any of them could lead to a forced breakup of Amazon if the most extreme remedies are pursued.
What this means for fashion brands
Here is the part that most fashion coverage of this story is missing.
Levi’s and Hanes are named in the filing not as wrongdoers, but as the brands Amazon allegedly pressured. They are the ones who made the calls to Walmart and Target. They are the ones whose emails confirm the price increases. They complied because they were afraid of losing the Buy Box, which for a brand of that scale is a genuinely serious commercial threat.
But compliance with an illegal scheme, even under duress, creates its own legal exposure. If California’s price-fixing theory holds, questions about what the participating vendors knew, what they documented, and whether their own counsel advised them on the antitrust implications of those emails become very relevant.
Every fashion brand that sells on Amazon and has received any communication from the platform about pricing on competitor sites should be asking itself right now whether those conversations were properly documented and reviewed. The conduct described in the filing as potentially constituting per se illegal price-fixing includes precisely the kind of routine account management conversation that happens between brands and their Amazon vendor managers every week.
Most fashionable brands are acutely focused on intellectual property, counterfeiting, and advertising regulation. Antitrust compliance in the context of platform pricing demands sits in a different part of the legal conversation. After this filing, it probably should not.
Amazon denies the allegations and says it will respond in court at the appropriate time. Its spokesperson described the motion as “a transparent attempt to distract from the weakness of its case.” The emails say something different, and a jury will have to decide which version it believes in January 2027.