
It is hard to think of a company that combines as many “evil corporation” tropes as Shein, the Chinese ultra-fast fashion giant. Several investigations have found exploitative conditions in the factories that make its clothing. It stands accused of benefitting from slave labour in Xinjiang. Its alarmingly cheap and often poor-quality garments, sold in huge quantities, fuel an environmentally destructive culture of disposable consumption. It has stolen countless designs, and dodges import duties by shipping small parcels straight to consumers. Its online shopping platform, where thousands of new styles appear every day, engages its Gen-Z audience with methods more familiar in the gambling industry. Its financial structure is opaque, its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party similarly unclear.
Little wonder, with a charge sheet like this, that Shein’s plans to list its shares on the London Stock Exchange have met with a deluge of criticism. Those voicing concerns have ranged from the British Fashion Council to Nigel Farage. Writing in The Times this month, Peter Hugh Smith, a prominent campaigner for ethical investment, warned of the UK becoming a “place of last resort for companies with dubious human rights records”. Welcoming Shein would signal more than a hint of desperation, given that the company is only coming to London after being rebuffed by Wall Street.
And yet, Britain really is desperate. Its once-mighty financial sector has been losing out to New York and Paris. Shein promises a boost in both symbolic and material terms: according to the FT, the company’s website sold a staggering $45 billion worth of goods in 2023, netting a profit of $2 billion. It could well be London’s biggest ever stock market debut. Shein has been courted not just by Conservative Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, but also by members of the Labour shadow cabinet, who will most probably be in government within the next month.
Maybe you thought Labour was an eco-friendly party led by a virtuous human rights lawyer. But Britain’s economic troubles will make it increasingly difficult for governments to uphold their stated ideals. Cost-of-living issues and grim national finances have already prompted both of Britain’s main parties to backtrack from environmental commitments, including Labour’s now-abandoned plans for a green investment splurge. At least Britain’s politicians are not the only ones facing such contradictions. The French government has also allegedly tried to woo Shein, despite passing a bill in March to penalise ultra-fast fashion companies, which it condemns for “creating buying impulses” with damaging “environmental, social and economic consequences”.
Is Shein a scourge to be tackled, or an opportunity we can’t afford to miss? That we are constantly fretting over the impact of American and Chinese technologies in this way points to a deeper problem for the UK, and Europe more broadly: we produce so few large-scale technologies of our own. Shein is a vivid illustration of how China has managed to leapfrog Europe to enter the age of Big Tech. Producing massive quantities of cheap clothes is the kind of activity China has been associated with since the Nineties, but Shein’s real strength lies elsewhere: in the sophisticated algorithms it uses to identify trends and co-ordinate its vast network of suppliers.
The company’s software scours the internet for emerging fashions, and feeds this information to somewhere between six to 12,000 factories, which then copy the styles and sell them online with targeted advertising. It has bypassed traditional design, retail and marketing to create, in effect, a new fashion industry, one that relies on wannabe social media influencers to create and spread new trends. TikTok now has close to a billion posts under the tag #sheinhaul — the “haul” being a mountain of new garments that shoppers display to their followers.
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