My Wild Theory And I'm Sticking With It
Complaints about fast fashion are a stitch up by slow fashion
We actually have outlets like Teen Vogue insisting that fashion is a bad thing. Or, rather, that fashion like fast fashion is a bad thing:
Shein has been making these billions by producing cheap clothing at an alarmingly fast rate for the last few years. The brand has amplified increasingly fast trend cycles, pushing competitors to do the same, all the while contributing to the massive clothing waste problems around the globe. Not only that, many accuse the brand of impacting local economies and businesses by flooding markets with cheap clothing.
Now, if we think of fashion as something that makes the girlies happy then more and cheaper is obviously better - more happy girlies.
As an aside some work I do means I have to at least scan places like GQ and so on on a regular basis and girlies here is a non-gendered term for the girls of both sexes. Sadly.
But if this is so then why is a magazine aimed at teen girlies unhappy with fashion - the thing that makes teen girlies happy - arriving more and cheaper?
And, I think the answer is that fashion is a business. Lots of well paid harpies get a nice living out of discussing hemlines. Which they’ll not do if a hemline is valued at $2 and below. There aren’t good livings to be made by harpies out of discussing chewing gum and that’s what Shein, Temu and so on make fashion worth - chewing gum levels of money.
So, the industry as a whole is rejecting this idea of fast fashion. For they realise, even if it’s only in a lizard brain manner, that turning their lifeblood into something bought with 10 minutes of minimum wage money excises them from the system.
And so the vitriol with which magazines like Teen Vogue - which makes money on advertising the aspirational to girlies - greets the arrival of Shein and the like which make fashion into disposables, not aspirationals.
Hmm, perhaps it’s not such a wild theory after all?
Stella McCartney complained about this while selling €290 T shirts. All of you, back into the fields, Now!
They simultaneously complain about the cost of living crisis and cheap clothes. Amazing.