Among the interviewees in Untold: Inside the Shein Machine (All4) is Fern Davey, an independent underwear designer from Bournemouth, who hand-stitches her pieces using sustainable materials. In 2020, the Chinese “fast fashion” brand Shein started selling a lingerie set that looked identical to one of Davey’s designs, with one clear difference: instead of costing £65, the imitation was £4. (Shein subsequently removed it from sale when Davey drew attention to the similarity.)
Fast fashion has done away with seasonal collections and high-street store displays, replacing them with websites offering styles that piggyback on social media trends and are sold in short bursts, until the next thing catches the crowd’s eye online and the brand starts flogging that instead. Fast fashion firms turn over high numbers of low-cost items quickly, a process that has now been turbo-charged by Shein: its clothes are priced so competitively, customers don’t mind if they only wear them once or not at all. Browse the app, choose some stuff, enjoy opening it and trying it on when it arrives. Maybe post your #sheinhaul on Instagram or TikTok if you like it, but if you don’t, chuck it away and forget it. It only cost a few quid. It doesn’t matter.
The programme’s headline scoop involves factory working practices, but the most valuable insights teased out by the reporter, Iman Amrani, are focused on the consumer. We learn here how the Shein app and website are precisely engineered to create an “infinite scroll” that is colourful and addictively friendly but loaded with “dark patterns”, the marketing term for techniques designed to make people buy on impulse: free shipping for a certain total spend, or discounts with a countdown clock to emphasise limited availability. The algorithm knows what you’re going to buy before you do. Shein established itself during Covid, when shoppers were even more liable to make impulse online purchases.
