I'm shopping at Abercrombie for the first time since I was in high school. Mildly triggering because this was like the coolest store back in the day. But I could never afford it because my family is middle class.
Now that I'm here, I'm noticing two main things. One is that everything is kind of affordable, which was definitely not the case in high school. The other thing that I'm noticing is that everything is just a little bit shittier than you'd want it to be.
Seeing a lot of like loose threads on things and a lot of stuff that's just made out of 100% synthetic fabrics. Clothing just doesn't feel like this nice, firm, high quality that I associate with Abercrombie. Abercrombie still does sell some high quality clothing.
I actually I really like this dress and would totally buy it. And I'm glad they've decided to start using normal lighting in their stores. But seeing so much cheap and low quality stuff there made me wonder, did clothing used to be better when I was a teenager?
Not just at Abercrombie, but across the board. So I scoured eBay, Depop and Poshmark for clothes from trusted brands of the '90's and 2000's. Then I went to those same stores and bought the 2024 version of each item.
Abercrombie was like legendary for really high quality denim. To compare the old and new, I got help from Amanda McCarty. I worked as a buyer in the fashion industry for about 20 years.
In the span of my career, I saw how what we sell people changed. The two major changes, I would say are, one, nothing fits properly anymore. It's not you.
It's nothing about your body. You're great. And two, the longevity of these clothes, even how you feel when you put them on, has degraded so much.
It's just not a good deal. It's not just in my head. It has gotten harder to find quality clothes that last, even at brands you used to like.
If you're wondering why, keep watching, I want you to think about how many new pieces of clothing you bought last year. If you're anything like the average American, it was around 68. in 1980 that number was 12.
But wait, it gets crazier. In the '80s, Americans spent about 7% of their annual income on clothes. Today, it's just 3%.
We spend half as much, even though we're buying five times more. This Abercrombie ad from the '80s helps explain why. The high quality wool was a huge selling point.
They even tell you exactly where it's from. And notice how they say this is part of their fall collection? Because in the '80s and '90s, stores only had new clothes a couple of times a year.
Usually a spring summer collection and a fall winter collection. And designers would start working on each collection up to nine months in advance because clothing production takes a lot of work. They had to think of hundreds of unique designs and whittle them down to the dozen or so best ones, send the designs to the factory, go back and forth with them for months to create a prototype, choose the best fabric, the right embellishments, and figure out the proportions for different sizes.
After all that, they place a massive order with the factory and then just pray the design would sell. It was kind of like a game of chance. You'd place two huge bets per year, and if your styles flopped, you'd be stuck with a whole bunch of clothes you'd have to sell or discount or just throw away.
That risk is why so much care and thoughtfulness went into making each piece of clothing and why you could expect quality at every price point. Even at discount stores like Sears or J. C.
Penney. Just look at the way J. C.
Penney advertised this suit in an ad from the '80s. Two piece suits that are expertly tailored, classically designed and have an elegant touch. They're not selling you on the price or the trendiness, but on the craftsmanship and design.
Even one of the cheaper suits on the market was still pretty high quality, which is probably why if you adjust for inflation, this $160 suit would cost $600 today. If you go to J. C.
Penney now, you can easily get a two piece suit for under $200. So in the '80s and '90s, people were buying fewer clothes, but they'd be well-made pieces that would be worn for years. And keeping up with all the trends?
Well, that was something only wealthy people could do. Pull the latest Brioni's and charge them to our account. Yes, ma'am.
What are Brioni's? Six months of my car payments, plus a car. Then came a little store called Zara and everything began to change.
The New York Times coined the term fast fashion in this 1989 article about the first U. S. store of Zara.
"The latest trend is what we're after," A Zara executive told The Times. "It takes 15 days between a new idea and getting it into the stores. " Remember that took most stores nine months.
How did Zara do it in 15 days? By streamlining this part of the production process with something called griege goods rather than manufacturing overseas. Zara built their own high tech factories in Spain, all connected to headquarters by an underground monorail.
There, robots working around the clock cut and dye fabrics to create unfinished, uncovered pieces that can be turned into any garment. Once the design is created, Zara can send those greige goods to their network of small shops in nearby regions where they're transformed into finished dresses, trousers and tops. Instead of huge orders, Zara makes a small batch of each style to start with.
The retail stores can then send feedback to headquarters about what's selling and what's not, and they can quickly ramp up production on whatever's popular, restocking within days if needed. It massively reduced the risk that came with clothing production. Instead of losing money on clearance sales or throwing away unsold goods, Zara's styles often sell out quickly.
The designers don't have to predict trends a year in advance. They can just respond to fashion trends as they emerge, though sometimes that gets a little sketchy. For example, here's a look from the high fashion designer, Celine, from a collection that debuted on the Vogue runway in 2013.
This skirt would have retailed for at least $1,000. And here's a very similar looking skirt selling on Zara's website for just $80. According to the Wayback Machine, Zara had this skirt for sale by August, which would have been just a few weeks after Celine's version landed in boutiques.
These runway knockoffs and how quickly Zara could get them into stores were wildly popular. By August 2008, Zara's parent company, Inditex, became the world's largest fashion retailer. This is also when you had the rise of two other fast fashion giants of the new millennium, Forever 21 and H&M, which pioneered a new way to bring the runway to the masses.
They partner with luxury designers to make exclusive lines for H&M at affordable prices, starting with Karl Lagerfeld in 2004. "Karl is it true? " "Of course, it's true.
" This part of the story, it seems sort of like a win for the 99%. Fast fashion was making it so that anyone could wear runway designs while they were still popular. That was a new thing.
Of course, encouraging lots of consumers to buy low cost clothes that would go out of style quickly would shockingly have some downsides, too. But we'll come back to that. Bcause we can't give the minds behind Zara and H&M all the credit for the rise of fast fashion.
We also have to give some credit to . . .
Bill Clinton? No, not because of his style. In 1994, President Clinton signed NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it cheaper to make clothes in Mexico.
And a few years later, he normalized trade relations with China. Textile factories started moving out of the U. S.
because now clothing retailers had access to the largest pool of cheap labor in human history. Luckily, there was a law from the '70s, The Multifiber Arrangement, which limited how much clothing American and European countries could import from other nations. Unfortunately, the World Trade Organization let it expire in 2005, ushering the heyday of fast fashion, because now there was nothing stopping companies from producing everything in the countries with the lowest wages, the fewest labor laws and the laxest environmental regulations.
We've arrived at the fashion landscape that I remember from my teens. In the 2000s, you had four distinct buying options ranging in price and quality: high fashion or luxury brands, department stores, mall brands and fast fashion. But these days, it kind of feels like the bottom of this pyramid has collapsed and everything's a little cheaper and shittier.
J. Crew, Anthropologie. Abercrombie These didn't used to be considered fast fashion, but now they arguably are.
And that's because of two very big things that changed the experience of shopping into the hellscape of today. The first is the 2008 financial crisis. Middle class consumers no longer had as much money to spend, so they began drifting over to cheaper options, while all of the other non fast fashion retailers were struggling.
Forever 21 was opening store after store after store. H&M, the same thing. Zara is spreading into other cities.
And so the conversation began, "How do we compete here? " "What if we continue to show the same prices on the price tags that we always have? But we know that we're going to sell most of the units of that style on sale, and we plan for that?
" So let's say this dress costs $40 to make and it retailed for $100 in 2007. In 2010, during the recession, the retailer would keep the price tag at $100, but expect that most pieces will only sell once it goes on sale. So they'll only spend, let's say, $15 to make it so they'll still make a profit.
And how do you make clothes for cheap? Well, by making cheaper clothes, you add synthetic materials like polyester instead of selling pure natural fibers like cotton and wool. You skimp on details like pockets, buttons and zippers and offer less sizes.
I could see all these things play out in the clothing I bought, like these men's jeans from Abercrombie, from the 2000s versus now. The vintage pair weighs a hefty 761 grams and is 100% cotton. They feel substantial, long lasting, really high quality denim.
They have a decent amount of distressing on here that was probably done by hand to sort of break down areas, make them softer. In the fast fashion era, a lot of this is skipped where it's just like, let's just spray them with acid or do other things that are like actually, like very toxic. The new pair weighs less at 720 grams and is a cotton elastane blend.
This is that fast fashion track of okay, if we add a little bit of stretch, it will fit more people theoretically and they'll be less likely to return them. But putting elastane in jeans shortens the lifespan pretty significantly. Those elastane fibers that are woven in here, they're plastic and they break.
And the more you wash them, the sooner they break. But you get into the cycle where you have to wash the jeans more often to get them to go back to size because they get stretched out. The other main difference between these jeans, the zippers.
We have a legit luxurious zipper, long lasting 100% metal. They smoothly go up and down like these are things that you take for granted until you get a bad zipper. The new pair, when you were trying to unzip these, that sound, you can feel like this zipper is going to be a problem soon.
This is a difference of maybe $0. 50, but it's a penny's game to get the pricing to work with the targets you're given. Another area that you can really see how quality degraded is with sweaters.
We compared an Anthropologie sweater from today to a vintage sweater made in the nineties. This sweater is Liz Claiborne, which is like Anthropologie before Anthropologie. The vintage sweater is 100% wool.
The one made today is 100% polyester. The vintage sweater has metal buttons. The other one has no buttons at all.
The vintage sweater is a size medium. The one made today is one size. When I see "one size" in something like, oh, it's because they couldn't afford to buy it in sizes to meet the margin targets.
Even with all these cost cutting measures, traditional retailers were struggling. And that's around the time private equity firms started buying them up, saddling them with debt and letting all the business decisions be made by finance bros, whose idea of fashion is that Patagonia vest over a gingham shirt. And on top of all that, there's still that other huge change that I mentioned.
The final death knell in quality clothing, the Internet. Social media and fast fashion are a match made in heaven. Social media helped shorten our attention spans, which extends to fashion trends too, which cycled through faster and faster.
That makes fast fashion indispensable to influencers who rely on a steady stream of new clothes for their content. This puts pressure on all of us to wear a totally unique, never before seen outfit every single day, which is pretty hard. Lizzie McGuire.
you are an outfit repeater. I guess now it's time to talk about Shein, Zara's more chaotic little sister, the logical conclusion of fast fashion. Shein is a company that focuses on selling as much hyper trendy, super low quality clothing.
They can for mind blowingly cheap prices. Shein raked in close to $10 billion in 2020. It's currently the biggest clothing retailer in the world, even beating out Amazon in the U.
S. Shein is not just fast fashion, it's instant fashion. Zara can get products from drawing board to store in 15 days.
Shein can do it in three. Zara can release 35,000 new items of clothes per year. Shein will release that many in just a couple weeks.
So how do they do it? Rather than functioning as a cohesive clothing manufacturer with its own factories like Zara, Shein is more like Amazon, a huge marketplace selling clothes from thousands of independent Chinese factories. And it treats those factories sort of like Uber treats its drivers.
The factories are hooked up to Shein's software that collects real time feedback about which items are selling well and which aren't. The software then sends alerts to the factory owners phones to ramp up or slow down production. It's Zara's small batch production on steroids.
And just like other billionaires, Shein finds creative ways to avoid U. S. taxes.
See, when you buy something from Shein, your clothes are shipped to you directly from the factory in China. There's no big Amazon style warehouses in the U. S.
full of Shein dresses. And since packages valued at under $800 can enter the U. S.
duty free Shein merchandise is pretty much always exempt from consumer goods tariffs. That exemption, it's called de minimis, was originally created so you could buy a rug or a lamp while you're on vacation and ship it back to yourself without having to pay tariffs, not for big clothing retailers. 50 years of fast fashion and ultra fast fashion has completely changed our relationship with clothes.
Instead of being something to cherish and care for, they're now just another cheap and disposable plastic consumer good. Thanks to fast fashion, clothing retailer is in a race to the bottom death spiral. Everything is fast fashion now.
And the thing is, all this overproduction, it doesn't just affect clothing quality. When private equity and fast fashion companies greedily maximize their profits, no matter what the cost, that hurts workers across the entire textile supply chain. Now, mass producing clothing has always relied on extremely exploitative labor and dangerous working conditions.
But as the industry gets bigger, the casualties and abuses do keep growing. Like when a garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013, killing over a thousand workers. But the fast fashion companies that produce clothes, they're hardly faced any accountability.
So it's no surprise that nearly ten years later, a 2021 investigation by Public Eye, a Swiss human rights group showed that factories that supply Shein are crowded and unsafe with blocked emergency exits and people regularly working over 75 hours a week. Slavery is still an issue, too. According to recent investigations, anywhere between 20 and 30% of clothes being sold in the U.
S. contain cotton from Xinjiang, a region in China with cotton farms that rely on forced labor from weavers and other Muslim minorities. The prices that we are offered on these clothes that are the prices we're willing to pay are not based in a reality where everybody involved is paid a living wage and works under good conditions.
I mean, they're built off of cutting corners and exploitation. Now, I want you to once again think of all those new clothes you bought last year. How many of them will you still be wearing next year.
. . the year after?
The average American gets rid of 81 pounds of clothes per year. And that's nothing compared to the hundreds of billions of pounds of unsold clothing and returns that manufacturers and retailers throw away. No one actually knows how much exactly it is, but we do know that you can see the world's textile waste from space.
This mountain of discarded clothes in Chile's Atacama Desert grows by 39,000 tons per year. The polyester that's in almost all clothing these days will take centuries to decompose. None of this bad PR is slowing down textile production at all.
Shein is on the verge of an IPO on the London Stock Exchange with a $64 billion valuation. That kind of stuff makes the fast fashion industry seem unstoppable. But there are people fighting back.
First, there's that de minimis tax exemption we talked about that allowed Shein to evade tariffs. A bipartisan group of lawmakers are trying to close that loophole. Meanwhile, New York lawmakers have introduced legislation to create for the first time legally binding environmental and labor standards for the industry.
And dozens of brands have been investigated for using cotton from Xinjiang, including H&M, Nike, Uniqlo, Burberry and Shein. But there's still a lot to be done, and the industry is going to fight every step of the way. Remember when I said Shein's IPO is in London?
The reason they're not doing it in New York is because they didn't want to comply with U. S. regulations that would force them to make disclosures about forced labor in their supply chain.
They haven't given up, though. They're lawyering up and lobbying against those regulations. Fast fashion is the story of unchecked corporate greed in a bargain for lower prices for.
well, you. Though, as we've shown, that hasn't actually worked out for consumers. We need lawmakers to continue cracking down on corporations like Shein because we all deserve clothes that look and feel good but don't require exploiting workers and destroying the planet just to be affordable.
