Unless you live with a teenager, you’re unlikely to know much about the brand that is breaking every fashion record going. That’s because Shein has systematically targeted under-25s through ultra-low prices, 3,000 new products a day, and one of the biggest viral Tik Tok campaigns in history.
Clearly, it’s working as this week news broke that a new funding round for the Chinese-owned brand is set to raise $100 billion (£76 billion) in value, making it one of the biggest and richest fashion companies on earth. By comparison, Inditex, which owns Zara, has a market cap of $68 billion. Shein was already the largest online-only fashion brand in the world, and its vast empire is about to get even more dominant. Now, the worry is that the rest of the fashion industry will have to match the speed with which it brings clothes to market and its almost unfathomably low prices.
For those of us who aren’t young enough to shop there, Shein represents much of what has gone wrong with the fashion industry: it sells huge volumes of £5 tops and £9 dresses, designed to appeal to the kind of person who doesn’t want to be seen twice (on social media or in real life) in the same outfit. Clothes this cheap also have a limited life-span. They are rarely designed to last, although the waste they create does, and pieces made by the brand are probably a major contributor to the UK’s £140 million worth of clothes that are sent to landfill every year.
Of course, certain brands have always achieved cult status among the very young: when I was a student, I would save up my money to visit the Topshop emporium on Oxford Street and I’m not alone in having dressed almost exclusively in Arcadia-produced clothes for the first five years of my adulthood. But Shein has offered this age group an entirely new shopping model.
