Question for HNers who have bought clothes on Shein: do the clothes have tags saying where they're made, and what they're made from? If so, what are both?
(Commodified clothes are a pet fascination of mine. The fact that we've gone from spending 15% of our annual income on apparel to 2-3% in just over a century is astounding[1]).
Briefly looked at the wife's side of the closest. First article that I stumbled upon with a Shein tag was a long sleeve blouse: neck tag labeled made in China, material tag (inner botton-left) labeled 5% elastane, 95% polyester.
There's a $1.8T global textile market out there and the best cherry-pick you could come up with to whine about is the micro-plastic residual of a single woman's laundry day?
It's not about a single woman's laundry habits, it's about how one person's habits represents the habits and by extension culture of everyone who does laundry.
This is a refreshingly optimistic take about the current state of fast fashion. For all the lack of quality and waste consumers are still coming out ahead by a huge margin.
Technology and scale made it so that boot story actually comes out in favor of the person buying and replacing cheap boots.
I think you maybe read a little too much optimism into my fascination :-)
I think fast fashion is pretty awful, all around. Clothes are cheaper than ever (great!), but we're also buying more, lower-quality, more wasteful clothes than ever.
(One of the things that fascinates me about this trend is how bimodal the apparel market is: a reasonable but naive assumption is that economies of scale would also lower the cost for clothes made from nicer textiles - especially when manufactured in the same locations - but instead anything that's "nicer" than low-weight cotton gets a quality tax.)
I'm thankful there's been a bit of a Renaissance in accessible well made garments. Mostly cottage. Or maybe I just didn't know where to look before.
A few pairs of darn toughs, ridge merino base layers and well made denim will last you a decade. Also unless you're exercising in them hardly needs any washing. Just doesn't smell. Ymmv
Can't imagine wearing all that polyester and acrylic crap. Doesn't feel good, doesn't look good, doesn't last, and yeah microplastics.
There were some comments here not so long ago in a related thread about the enshittification of either (cannot recall) furniture (compared to ikea) or household appliances (why a 1950’s fridge may still be working while one from 5 years ago is already dead). The bimodal sentiment/comment was also applied for those markets, as a complaint of why couldn’t there be some midrange stuff for ecologically-conscious but luxury-adverse people.
The “conclusion” was that people looking for the cheapest stuff are going to inevitably buy at the cheapest end, provoking a race to the bottom for manufacturers. People who like brands, quality, or status will go to the high end, independent of price, creating incentives for the companies to just sell things more expensively for a higher margin. There just wasn’t (according to the comments) enough market mass (nor business interest) to cater for that middle spot that ironically so many of us are looking for.
> Technology and scale made it so that boot story actually comes out in favor of the person buying and replacing cheap boots.
If you ignore the externalities. Extending the analogy, the boot story comes out in favor of buying cheap boots AND the persons' grandchildren have to struggle against ecological challenges they did not create and only tangentially benefit from.
(Commodified clothes are a pet fascination of mine. The fact that we've gone from spending 15% of our annual income on apparel to 2-3% in just over a century is astounding[1]).
[1]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2006/may/wk5/art02.htm