Andrea Cheong wants to turn your clothes inside out. Or rather, she wants you to do it. The 32-year-old self-styled “fashion educator” from north London is a reformed fashion influencer. She now reviews clothes for her 248,000 TikTok and 152,000 Instagram followers, analysing clothing, accessories and shoes with an unsparing eye for cost, quality, construction and materials. Cheong operates without fear or favour, and is as likely to flame Prada as she is Primark. Her videos are addictively watchable, mostly because Cheong is scathing and hilarious. “Is everyone OK?” she asks in one review of a fraying Mango dress. “If this is what they call premium, I’m genuinely quite concerned.” But these videos are also informative: educating viewers about what to expect of their clothes, and how to spot indicators of poor quality.
If Cheong has one ethos, it is this: we need to start reading the care labels in our clothes the same way we would read the ingredients on a packet of crisps. This is because, as she writes in her 2023 book Why Don’t I Have Anything to Wear?, “the story is in the care label … We can’t keep going for style over substance.”
