Shein beat Amazon and reinvented fast fashion
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Not to say Shein isn't responding well to an economic niche. Just, that it has an externalised cost: disposal of clothes on a fashion whim is not a good thing.
Although I suppose there's a separate externality to creating friable material. The issue of discarding too much should be addressed with higher prices at the dump.
But you could be right: carbon pricing down to the edge on all things might actually be good economics if we can work out how to make it run. Please don't say blockchain
Which brings us right back to (very) fast fashion.
sure - long enough for you to run around Central City robbing every bank.
Whether in inputs (unethical labor practices, questionable material composition, hazardous inputs handling, manipulative marketing tactics and artificial scarcity) or in outputs (planned obsolescence, unsustainable consumption, disposal, discounting full product life-cycle), socio+ecological costs are ignored to maximize profits while keeping prices fairly low.
It's good to democratize access to more and fancier options but if this comes by cheating and a dishonest accounting of costs, it's not worth it (full cost accounting will be better in the long run, having to account for product full life cycle might spur investment and innovations in say, mechanical disposal automation or plasma arc gasification).
Taxes (and thereby price adjustments) can achieve some social goals. Empirically so, not assumed.
Both the "state" and "us" are social constructs, and are simultaneously both essentially the same concept and entirely separate concepts. The nice thing is that we don't need theory here, we can just try it and find out if it helps, then try something else if it fails.
If the dump costs more, people create unlicensed dumps. Thus the cost remains external.
So one (Shein) might be less bad per unit style but encourages more rapid churn. The other traditional model claims fast, but is slower, but has higher upfront build and ship consequences.
I don't think this detracts from your broader point, though -- your specific example just happened to be the unusual exception to an otherwise good rule.
TJ Maxx is interesting in that it is fast fashion but it provides a useful outlet for clothes that would otherwise have been trashed.
So immediately it is a positive since it ensures more clothes are worn than they would have been otherwise.
In the long run, however, by providing those clothes value beyond their original life TJ Maxx helps prop up the finances of fast fashion, so maybe it’s a net negative? It’s not clear to me.
Frankly there isn't much alternative.
A bit farther along you can find arbitrage type businesses reselling lots or whole sale and warehouse overstock, army/navy/surplus, vintage boutiques upselling estates or whatever wont sell in retail stores for whatever reason. This is an easy option, but the price is higher since someone is curating a selection or otherwise squeezing a profit from what might've been refuse.
A lot of the old-school sources (flea, thrift) have been experiencing additional inventory pressure caused by another great option which is depop, etsy, ebay, or other online shops (even goodwill has an online auction site[0]). Tons of practical, uncommon, and cool thrift finds are available online at the general cost of people farming thrift and flea markets for popular sizes, driving up prices and reducing popular sized stocks. But this also keeps tons of old weird stuff in peoples closets out of the garbage by granting a more obvious value proposition. GenZ people seem to be embracing this quite a bit. It sounds like a fun side-hustle for a college student.
Frankly, if you are buying regular wardrobe, I'd make the fairly obvious recommendation of just simply buying practical, usable, and good quality. If what you buy works well and lasts a reasonable period, thats a great definition of value to follow towards the best manufacturers. Maybe buy it from a store you like and don't worry about it if we've stopped the urge to buy a little bit of trash because we feel weird at 2am. We is me.
Most of the fast fashion cheap stuff is uselessly flimsy, but maybe it would work alright for a costume or some kind of bedroom scenario. I guess in one respect fast fashion is useful insofar as its hard to find some of that weird one-off junk-stuff in a thrift store or even the mall, because nobody will buy it. Its ugly and the fabric is itchy.
That said, it's generally limited to the segment of people who are aware of fast-fashion, have their own reasons to disdain it, can afford the substantial premium of sticking to slow fashion, and are willing to follow through. This is perhaps a smaller market than might be wished for.
How does all of that waste compare to all of the waste involved in making your comment? Not just the infra required to host it and distribute it, but the devices required for you to make it. Kind of turning a blind eye to the amount of "cost shifting of waste streams to developing nations" that electronic devices create.
Fast fashion clothing often falls apart after a single wash and at the latest after two. They are meant to worn once and then to be disposed. I agree that some electronics like smartphones should be made to last for more than 2 years but fast fashion creates much, much more plastic waste on its own. We already know how to make longer lasting, more environment friendly clothing, so it's not like we couldn't do any better.
Is that hyperbole? Or is it really that bad? I always thought fast fashion meant stuff like those cheap Amazon brands (!Solid etc.) that only last around a year…
Anecdotally, it seems like women’s fast fashion falls apart a lot faster than men’s apparel from the same brands. And some brands are a lot worse than others (e.g. Forever 21 is a lot worse than H&M)
I bought a F21 shirt exactly once and on the third wash there were numerous holes in it.
So your comment seems to be quite the hyperbole.
His waste comment is compared to a baseline of something more durable.
Extremely poorly? Computers, especially servers and the kind of clients that HN users tend to favour, are built to be robust and last years if not decades; many HN folk are proud of how long theirs last. The kind of computer that gets thrown away quickly is the fashion-driven kind, and that's not a coincidence.
And water waste. [0]
Most people have no idea how water intensive the textile dyeing of their clothes really is.
Buy high quality clothes and wear them as long as possible.
[0] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/putting-brakes-f...
Luckily there are alternatives, in the Netherlands I found [1] (apologies, also in Dutch), and there are many more of such companies. The crazy thing is that it's really not that expensive and they even make the clothing high quality so I have to shop less (I hate shopping). (Ok, so I never really was the target for fast fashion.) I'm open to other suggestions for responsible (quality) clothing.
Thanks for the NPO tip: definitely going to watch it :)
Edit: Are there also brands specifically aiming at quality? So that denim pants just last a lot longer for example? Paying more feels even better if I'm really buying quality. The Skot polo I bought seems to be really good fabric and well made, they also touted that, that really adds a lot to the whole value proposition, for me.
Another edit: This is also a nice initiative which could perhaps be leveraged more, specifically by ethical companies: [0]
If you'd like to have a longer conversation about this, feel free to contact me at arjan [at] fairbee.com
We're also looking at different ways to ship, especially the last mile, trying to use electric cargo bikes instead of vans, and bundling packages across other shops as well via izipack for instance.
edit: one thing about the quality we're running into is it's hard to get across online how different the hoodies we have (from Athrty for example) look from the hoodies you'd buy at H&M for instance. As soon as you have them in your hands you can tell the difference, but on pictures that's way less apparent.
I now own previously unworn Armini jeans, previously unworn Drykorn's, Scotch & Soda etc. About € 5 each. Actually I am dressed better than ever before.
Pro-tip : don't buy used shoes.
And you will feel this primarily in your knees very soon.
I would pay €25-40 if a shirt is really good...
I'm often assured that "toxic masculinity" doesn't mean an inherent criticism of masculinity, and is a phrase that many institutions seem to think is a productive way to talk about problems they perceive as being male gendered.
I find it interesting to consider whether it would also be productive to refer to fast fashion as "toxic femininity", as it's often literally so, given pesticides, plastics, fertilisers.
I will not perhaps be the first to do this, however.
We teach them that they can't wear white after a certain time the year, and then black after a certain time. Why? Just because. We teach them never to wear the same outfit as their friend at the same party. We teach that they always have to wear perfect clothes.
There are examples of people fighting these things (such as ripped jeans) but they're the rebels, not the norm.
So yeah, I think that in regards to most clothing issues, "toxic femininity" definitely applies.
For fast fashion... I don't know. I have never paid attention to that scene, so I don't know how much it affects men.
Also, I should note that "toxic masculinity" generally only refers to behaviors that straight men show, and not gay men. And is often badly applied.
One could also make the argument that it is a patriarchal attitude to suggest women are so lacking in agency, that a popular interest amongst woman could be reducible solely to the interest of pleasing men.
But jokes aside I think it generally applies here, we don't live in an equal society so women don't experience the level of agency men do, even in the presence of wealth.
There are immense pressures for women to like certain things, dress certain ways, etc. Men have their own pressures, but they have more agency when choosing how to dress specifically. Can you think of a single woman CEO that can get away with dressing like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, for example?
Yet - women wearing mens clothing choices is very normal.
I’m not saying men have it worse or anything btw - just giving vision to the other side which is ignored often. Men have simplistic wardrobes out of habit but also because they literally are so limited in what they can wear. Choose your bottom - pants, pants, jeans, or pants. Choose your top - polo, button down, or t-shirt. Those are your options. You can try to add layers like a scarf, sweater, suit jacket, etc. but mens fashion is inherently way more limited due to gender norms. It’s not a surprise that you see CEOs wearing the same thing everyday because they’re like, “well, what else can I fucking wear? I can’t wear different dresses everyday with different cuts and patterns and designs. It’s not masculine. I’ll be ridiculed.” So they go with what is exceptionally boring and repeatable because very few people will even notice to begin with…
Even when men just accessorize - it becomes a costume and a joke. Prime example - Bezos wore a cowboy hat. Now it’s a costume you can buy off Amazon because of the cowboy hat. It should really show you how men cannot wear almost anything outside the norms without heavy critique. So they go with what is safest and normalized and just wear that every single day.
The difference I'd highlight to you is that women are taught these things to get a husband and fulfill their traditional roles in a patriarchal society. They are baby incubators as far as that system is concerned.
Men are taught to be aggressive or not show emotions not because it will get them a wife and family, but because in Western society the chain of command goes: God -> Father -> Mother -> Children
In fact many of our cultural cornerstones rest on this baked in assumption, like The Iliad. The entire plot is set into motion by a tantrum wherein Achilles does not want to hand over a captive woman he views as his property. Thousands die in that pissing contest with a human being as the prize.
Now imagine we say Helen of Troy is displaying toxic femininity by investing so much in her appearance. Well, the reason she does is because it's the only source of her worth (besides making children of course) to a patriarchal society such as that of Ancient Greece
> In fact many of our cultural cornerstones rest on this baked in assumption, like The Iliad.
"So speaking glorious Hektor reached out to take his son. But the child shrank back crying against the breast of his girdled nurse, terrified at the sight of his own father...Hektor took the helmet straight from his head and laid it gleaming on the ground. Then he kissed his dear son and dandled him in his arms..."
I challenge this. Men are taught to be strong, aggressive, and not show emotion precisely because it's seen as how strong men behave, and being a strong man is seen as a way to get a wife and family.
I have never met a man who cared about what color of anything they wear.
I have never heard a man even notice makeup, other than being too much.
And the big one--shoes. Men don't notice shoes. We just gasp at the price. I have a sister who because a multimillionaire making/selling shoes to women. She knew how they felt about shoes, and exploited it. Oh yea, throw in hand bags. I have never heard a male utter this sentance, "But did you see her handbag?"
Female fashion is not due to men. Men got a break on this one war. You can argue the mini-skirt was man's doing, but that's pretty much it.
(This is just for America. I have no clue to the rest of the world.)
I’ve never understood why this isn’t called toxic femininity. If society’s standards of femininity cause women to become anorexic, that standard of femininity is clearly toxic. Just like how a standard of masculinity that causes men to take steroids and damage their bodies would rightly be considered toxic by everyone.
I think the reason is that there’s a kind of cat-coupling. When you say “I visited the famous golden gate bridge”, you don’t mean “among all the golden gate bridges, I visited the one that was famous”. You mean “I visited the golden gate bridge, and by the way the golden gate bridge is famous”.
When you say “toxic masculinity” even if you mean “the subset of masculinity which is toxic”, it’s possible to interpret that as “masculinity, and by the way masculinity is toxic”.
Feminist academics, being mostly female, have no emotional response to the idea that saying all masculinity is toxic, so the possible misinterpretation doesn’t bother them. But they might have a response to someone saying all femininity is toxic, so they wisely chose a term that was less likely to be misinterpreted (“internalized misogyny”). More diversity in their field would have prevented them from making the same mistake w.r.t. toxic masculinity.
Perhaps it would then also be helpful to use toxic misandry instead of toxic masculinity because as you mention people can take it to mean that men by nature are toxic.
Toxic masculinity isn't misandry, so, no, it wouldn't be helpful. Both toxic masculinity and internalized misogyny are aspects of partriarchal socialization; they aren't symmetrical with regard to sex or gender.
Because language itself is also subject to societal bias - it's turtles all the way down.
Men are by default the transgressor - they are actively aggressive and when good things happen to men it's because they went out and fought for it and got it done and when bad things happen to or because of a man it's because of a flaw in the man, a failure to actively improve ones self. These are both not true pictures of reality, of course, but the man is always the one depicted with the active tense, for better and worse.
Women are by default the passive transgressee - when something bad happens to a woman it's often because they are the victim of a system or person that was stronger than them - they could hardly be expected to do otherwise. Similarly when something good happens it's often lucky, thanks to the support system of the people around them, or even worse painted as an 'inspirational' exception that is novel only for it's improbability.
The truth is somewhere in there, but with all the layers of human abstraction on top of it it's hard to prise it apart, but one thing is for sure - our language informs how we think in a very concrete way.
Men's fashion or even just basic clothing choices are very restricted as well and have their own rules. In that case it's not fast fashion, but the toxic fashion industry goes well beyond feminity.
I currently have a bag full of mens clothes to take to the tailor to repair: holes in pockets, elbow holes, loose buttons.
I suspect wherever you buy the clothes from they likely come from the same sweatshops and factories in Asia just with different markup.
Many people say Zara is fast fashion, yet I sit in the Zara clothes that have lasted me 2-3 years. We are fortunate to be able to produce high quality clothing incredibly cheaply due to the wonders of modern manufacturing and the brutal exploitation of foreign labour - yet that won't stop people throwing it in the bin to get the next shiny thing an 'influencer' has shilled.
Sure, it's perhaps a bit niche. But there's a thriving open source community at https://FreeSewing.org/
Full disclosure: I am the FreeSewing maintainer
It's rather disturbing to read about so much undercutting and unethical practices to satisfy consumer demands. Makes me wish more people might become mindful of the impact of their purchases, so they make a conscious decision of whether or not to feed an industry that does business like this.
At the heart of these issues is Shein’s aggressive business model. Comparisons to fast-fashion giants like H&M miss the point: it’s more like Amazon, operating a sprawling online marketplace that brings together around 6,000 Chinese clothing factories. It unites them with proprietary internal management software that collects near-instant feedback about which items are hits or misses
We need much more transparency about these practices, be it SHEIN, Amazon or Apple... I do doubt however that people would make more conscious consumer choices even if they know about it. The pandemic has made me very pessimisic.
But for a small, independent fashion designer it's not quite feasible to take on a large Chinese corporation in court.
(IANAL and I remembered it vaguely, here they explain a bit better) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_design_copyright
I agree. I was referring to this claim. This is a bit special in fashion. We can see often how inditex and others copy designs. Just remarking that some things that would clearly be copyright infringements in other contexts might not be in fashion.
We always wash clothes before wearing because of the chemicals used during manufacture, and to make clothes feel soft in the store.
Fashion is valuing things based on some definition or perception of popularity. It's chasing the dragon.
But anything can be corrupted. Fast fashion is an especially deleterious evolution of wearable art, imho.
Slow fashion on the other hand is about creating items that last for years, even decades. Each item might have greater environmental cost to produce, but the cost per wear is far lower.
Having a cycle that cannot be planned and offers a short window to profit, creates strong incentives to compromise on these relatively stable systems. This is compounded by the vast majority of fashion brands outsourcing production, and often design, sourcing, etc. So if a new item appears to be about to become extremely popular:
- Don't have time (or want to maximise margins) to design an item? Copy someone else's. - Don't have time to find a new factory? Offer the contract to one you know that doesn't have capacity to produce it safely. Or quickly pick a new one without doing any supply chain checks. - Don't have time to source materials? Let the factory pick what they want without oversight. - Factory owner doesn't have time to source additional labour? Secretly outsource to a cheaper factory with worse conditions to keep the margin. They might never get another contract anyway. - Factory owner has an unrealistic price per unit to achieve? Just reduce the quality.
The lack of stability means that there are just no incentives for anyone to anything "right".
It's considered acceptable to repost an article for a second try, so long as you don't delete the original. It's mostly just timing, though I have bookmarked a few users' profiles for a shortcut to curation :)
However, I keep posting stuff on r/de (German subreddit) and mods remove it or let it pass at a whim even though very clear rules have been established over the years. Sometimes thread types which I have clearly seen before with hundreds of upvotes are removed because of violating content rules. The next day someone posts a picture of a frog and it's sitting at 2.6k upvotes (I think the Wednesday frog meme is super embarrassing but anyway...)
EDIT: Reading the article and others about Shein my assumptions were apparently correct. Sigh.
> At some point in the 2020s ... we're going to learn that some sort of chemical or microscopic thing that’s inside everything, all around us, actually has some horrible health effect we never knew about before. My pick for what it’ll be? Microplastics – particularly the microplastics inside clothing, like athleisure.
> I have no idea what kind of health hazard it’ll pose, but it’ll be one that takes a long time to develop, and where childhood exposure gets linked in a study to some awful condition that happens to you later. It could be that all these cheap, fast-fashion clothes are secretly off-gassing some volatile organic compound that we breathe in and gives us cancer later, or maybe it could be something like physical micro plastic particles getting on our hands, and then into our stomach when we eat, and then it gets linked to some digestive disorder or intolerance, or maybe it kills our gut bacteria, or I dunno.
Couldn't agree more. (The rest of his 10 Predictions for 2020 missed the most important one...)
Shein sells worldwide. H&M (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) and other US brands don't ship to most countries in the world, if they ship overseas at all.
A guy in Samoa, Pakistan, or most other countries can't go to hm.com and buy anything.
Shein ships to 220 countries.
Simplicissimus got unusually emotional and preachy in this video, which I'm going to count against them because they have their own fashion brand with 80€+ sweaters "produced in Europe" (which means they couldn't even write produced in EU, which in turn means it's going to be produced in Turkey, under similarly bad conditions as Shein produces).
They didn't make such a series about any other fast fashion brand, and I'm pretty sure the reason they got this preachy is not because of the bad work conditions or environmental issues, but because they fear that SHEIN will copy their own designs.
I'm very disappointed that they made such a video, considering the entire industry of fast fashion as well as the parts of the fashion industry based on exclusivity are at fault, and it's not just limited to one company like Shein but a systemic problem. If you avoid SHEIN and buy from another fast fashion brand, or even CultureCulture, the label of the Simplicissimus authors, you've done nothing to avoid the problem.
Buy second hand products instead. Learn sewing. Fix old clothes instead of throwing them away.
Also see the Strg F documentary on Sneakerjagd how Nike just grinds up new unsold sneakers to ensure exclusivity and grinds up returns to avoid having to process them.