How fast fashion puts green issues in the slow lane
UNLESS you are under the age of 30, you’ve probably never heard of fashion brand Shein.
It has no physical stores and virtually no staff on the ground in the UK.
Yet from its base in Shenzhen in China, it could soon be the biggest retailer of fast fashion in Britain, selling an estimated 30,000 items here every day and spending more on advertising than any other clothing label.
Its target market is teens and young adults, which they reach by bombarding them with adverts via Facebook, Instagram and one of the biggest viral TikTok campaigns in history. As a result, the Shein hashtag now has 3.2 billion views on the social media platform.
As a student I would save up my money to visit Topshop or Miss Selfridge – rewearing the outfit to death. But now Shein, alongside Missguided and Boohoo, offer young women an entirely different shopping experience with such cheap clothing they make Primark look expensive. Its soaring popularity has also not only been criticised for adding to the mountains of disposable clothes, but also for being another nail in the coffin for high-street stores.
Shein, which claims to have “thousands of new styles” daily on its website, has been accused of copying other designers, getting items ready for shipping in just three days. In comparison, Zara takes about three weeks for a design to go from the drawing board to the shop floor.
But such a tight turnaround time comes at a huge environmental cost. Nearly half of the 2,400 comments left by Shein customers on review website Trustpilot give just one star (‘ bad’) out of five. Many complained they had to bin items that fell apart after the first wear or didn’t look like the website photos.
Despite this business model of selling cheaply made clothes in huge volumes at bargain-basement prices, Shein raked in an estimated £11billion this year.
Cheap offers make sites like this a huge temptation. But clothes sold this cheaply come with a much bigger cost to the environment.
Nearly half of Shein’s Trustpilot reviews give it just one star