With the excitement of festivals, events, vacations, and buying flights peoples virtual carts start to fill up fast.
From Coachella, stagecoach and huge vacationing destinations, people are turning to ultrafast fashion like SHEIN, PrettyLittleThing and FASHION NOVA for their one-time outfits.
With the prices so low and shipping so fast, it’s easy to understand the appeal – but growing dependency on these fast fashion brands brings questions about sustainability and consumer culture.
Behind the rapid turnover of styles, many workers are being unpaid and overworked scrambling to meet the demand of the ever-scrolling audience of people.
SHEIN alone adds thousands of new items to it’s site daily, a rate that traditional fashion brands can’t match.
People on Instagram, Tik tok and other social media platforms are flooded with content creators posting “SHEIN haul” or “My $500 SHEIN haul” as they are conditioned to associate trips and events with new/fresh clothes which fast fashion has capitalized on that mindset.
Having fast fashion becoming more popular, people start to depend upon last impulse purchases.
Ironically, the Trump administration’s new foreign policy might accidentally be the end of this exploitative industry. Tariffs on cheap Chinese goods, like clothes, are creating a not so far future where Shein’s fast fashion dominance ends.
Companies like Shein and Temu thrive on a business model that uses cheap ultra fast production and tariff loopholes. A crackdown on Chinese imports specifically can drive customers away from fast fashion websites. The unbelievably low prices that used to make them stand out are quickly disappearing, with shipping and fees becoming a bigger part of the bill.
However the sheer volatility of Trump’s tariffs lessen this impact. In just a little over 100 days in office, Trump has lowered and raised tariffs several times. The most recent of these changes came just yesterday with the US and China mutually lowering tariffs by 114%. Everyone can see that these tariffs are more bite the bark, and that means in all likely hood
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