Fast fashion giant Shein’s valuation has dropped by about one-third, from $100 billion to $64 billion, according to reports last week, as the company raises funding and prepares to go public. That IPO, potentially coming this year, will ignite talk about sustainability and labor standards in the fashion industry—because Shein is such a bad actor on both fronts. But as those numbers show, being a bad actor can bring in big money. The company’s share of the U.S. fast fashion market has soared, going from 12% in January 2020 to 50% in November 2022.
Shein’s prices are extremely low, prompting the phenomenon of the “Shein haul,” where TikTokers show off a large number of clothes gotten for a relatively small amount of money. That’s a social media phenomenon glorifying the environmental and human costs of a single company’s lousy way of doing business, and it raises the question of what it would look like to do better.
RELATED STORY: In the fast fashion debate, information beats shame
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Shein releases thousands of new designs every day (with many styles reportedly being copied from independent designers). While most are released in small numbers and not repeated if they don’t sell well, the effect is to drive purchases because there is always more to buy, and it’s always cheap. People buying lots of clothes that are then treated as disposable is an environmental nightmare in an industry that is already a major source of carbon emissions.
But that’s not the only harm Shein is doing in the world.
In December, Shein announced it would put $15 million into "improving standards" at factories after a report on its treatment of workers that was shocking even if you assume all your clothes are made in horrible sweatshops. That announcement came after an investigation by Britain’s Channel 4, which found workers making garments for as little as 4 cents apiece, subject to their pay being slashed if they made mistakes, while working up to 18 hours a day with just one day off each month. Those conditions are illegal in China, where the factories were located.
Even among Shein’s slightly less shady fast-fashion competitors, workers’ wages are an extraordinarily small part of the retail price of a garment—as low as 0.6% and, across the fashion industry as a whole, rarely more than 3%. And while it’s true that the cost of living varies around the world, and what sounds like a shockingly low pay rate by U.S. standards can be a living wage in another country, the countries where a significant amount of fast-fashion clothes are made are ones where garment industry wages are well below a local living wage. According to Sheng Lu, an assistant professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware, the minimum wage for garment workers in Bangladesh is 66% of the living wage. In China, it’s just 49%. (And we in the U.S. should not congratulate ourselves—our minimum wage is just 70% of the living wage, according to the same source.)
So what might it look like to do better? In a recent Twitter thread, menswear writer Derek Guy laid out plausible costs for making a men’s button-down shirt in the United States with high-quality fabric and workers paid in a non-exploitative way.
In other words, even if you cut out brick-and-mortar retailers, with their associated real estate and labor costs, a well-made shirt with decent labor practices and good fabric is going to cost more than fast-fashion offerings.
Later in the thread, Guy notes that “Of course, producing something in the US is no guarantee of fair labor practices. In the US, there's something called piece rate production, which helps factories skirt minimum wage laws. This is how brands like Forever 21 sometimes produce in the US.” That’s not what he’s talking about here. And he takes direct aim at Shein, and at the people who are allowing brands like Shein to define what they are willing to pay for clothes:
A key problem as a consumer is that you have no guarantee that higher prices mean better labor and environmental practices without doing the research brand by brand. You can look at FashionChecker.org for (largely bad) grades on several aspects of responsibility. You can look for brands that trumpet socially conscious claims—and then ask questions, because in some cases, it’s all marketing. But you have to go in knowing that if the clothes are cheap like whoa, and the brand is built on getting you to buy those cheap products in huge volume, the news is not good for either the workers or the environment.
Election season is already here, and it's already off to an amazing start with Democrats' huge flip of a critical seat in the Virginia state Senate, which kicks off this episode of The Downballot. Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard dissect what Aaron Rouse's victory means for November (abortion is still issue #1!) when every seat in the legislature will be on the ballot. They also discuss big goings-on in two U.S. Senate races: California, where Rep. Katie Porter just became the first Democrat to kick off a bid despite Sen. Dianne Feinstein's lack of a decision about her own future, and Michigan, which just saw veteran Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow announce her retirement.
