"It's like getting a coffee or a packet of crisps; it's a spur-of-the-moment thing you don't have to feel guilty about." Anyone older than 40 will be surprised to hear that Jessica, 21, is talking about Fashion – specifically the 10 to 20 pieces of clothing she buys a month from Shein. 

Her haul includes tulle mini skirts, strappy tops, neon hot pants, cut-out dresses and metallic trousers. The items are colourful, head-turning and often shoddily made, and while the quantity sounds excessive, absurd even, it isn't. At least not financially. 

In December, Chinese brand Shein overtook Zara to become the world's most searched-for fashion company online. Its shopping model is based on buying in bulk and prices so low that choosing between a cappuccino and a £4 top is perfectly logical. As a brand, it has been phenomenally successful – a funding round last year put its value at $100 billion (£76 billion), making it the biggest and richest fashion firm on Earth. By comparison, the Spanish multinational Inditex, which owns Zara, has a market cap of $68 billion. 

And yet because it largely monopolises one section of the market, you might not have heard of it. But Shein's meteoric rise means that practically every young person in this country –whether they shop there or not – will know exactly what it is. 
Shein (pronounced "she-in") was launched in 2008 as a small online wedding dress company in Nanjing and today is still run out of China. 

There is very little information on owner Chris Xu: he is said to be a dual national of China and America and allegedly now lives in Hong Kong, but that's about it. We do know that the immense success of Shein means he must be a billionaire, although unlike the tech bros of Silicon Valley, he isn't on social media, and has never spoken publicly about his company.

"The great irony of Shein is that it's incredibly aggressive and will market you to the point of relentlessness," says Iman Amrani, who last October released an investigative documentary with Channel 4 called Inside the Shein Machine. "Adverts for Shein are all over my Instagram and I still get spammed daily by bots in my messages telling me to shop there. And yet if you want to know anything about Shein – their labour practices or even who runs it – it's almost impossible."

Amrani did her best to break this wall of silence by sending an undercover journalist posing as a migrant garment worker to one of Shein's affiliated factories in Guangdong. The journalist, Mei, smuggled hidden cameras inside for the first time.
It makes for difficult viewing. When clothing is this cheap, workers are under pressure to produce hundreds of items a day. Employees work long hours. If mistakes are made, wages are reportedly withheld or docked. According to Mei, workers are allowed just one day off per month ("There's no such thing as Sundays here," said one of the managers in the documentary).

Making promises

If true, these practices would break both Chinese labour laws and Shein's own code of conduct. After the documentary was aired, the brand released a statement saying that it was extremely concerned about the allegations it contained. A month later, it said it would invest $15 million (£12.2 million) in improving standards at its supplier factories; a spokesman told me that Shein wages are 40 per cent above the Chinese average for garment work, that the documentary had exaggerated the long hours worked and that workers take at least (a hardly sybaritic) two to three days off a month.

But when a dress costs £10, profit margins are so narrow that workers cannot logically be paid much more than their paltry base salary (plus a commission based on the volume of work done) if the business is going to work. 

A new report by Greenpeace suggests that buying Shein's Clothes might even be bad for your health. At the end of last year, Greenpeace Germany spoke out against the brand, publishing evidence it had gathered that 15 per cent of its fabrics contained high levels of phthalates and formaldehyde, which, according to the organisation, shows "a careless attitude towards environmental and human health risks associated with the use of hazardous chemicals, in pursuit of profit". While the science is new, various studies have suggested that high exposure to phthalates can cause allergies and fertility problems in both men and women, and even increase your likelihood of developing cancer.

The outlet's relentless marketing, of course, mentions none of this. Aside from promotional deals with reality TV stars such as Khloé Kardashian and Georgia Toffolo (who cut short her contract in November following the documentary), the brand largely promotes its wares through micro-influencers with fewer than 10,000 followers. Instead of paying them, Shein will send bags of free clothes to the mostly very young women who will then film themselves trying on their #sheinhaul for TikTok or Instagram alongside a link to a discount code that their followers can use. The code lets the brand monitor how much money each influencer is making, then decide who to keep working with. 

"At every point of the chain, it's women being targeted," says Amrani. "It's women who work in the factories, female influencers who are being exploited and largely female customers being bombarded by their adverts. And even if you're not on TikTok, if you search for any type of clothing on Google, it's always Shein that comes up first. It can feel like they're everywhere."

Shein's approach to Google is  highly unusual in the fashion world. According to Claire Jarrett, who coaches businesses on how to advertise online, Shein is spending around £1 million a month in the UK alone to be at the top of Google searches. "It's a huge amount," she says, "and they have tons of vague keywords like 'jumper', 'lingerie', 'dress' and even 'clothes', whereas most brands will  be as specific as possible."

This scattergun approach suggests that rather than trying to find loyal clients, Shein wants that first sale – and therefore a customer's details – at any cost. Jarrett says: "They are clearly being funded by investors with very deep pockets: this is such an inefficient way to spend money." 

Localised approach

Unlike brands such as Zara, which tend to take inspiration from the catwalk, Shein has a highly localised approach to design. Small independent brands have claimed it has plagiarised their clothing. One allegedly popular tactic of the brand is to copy designs worn by local influencers then sell them in that particular area. This means someone in Liverpool can be shown very different clothes to someone in Louisiana or Lisbon. 

New clothes are also released daily and then relentlessly marketed to existing customers, leading to a culture of constant consumption where women like Jessica are shopping every other day. Financially this is affordable – dresses cost as little as £10 and tops can be as cheap as £3 – but the environmental cost is huge and it's clearly a blip in our increasingly woke world, where Greta Thunberg is a figure of admiration for some of gen Z, but where fast fashion is a forgotten black hole for another large swathe of the market. 

"Two-thirds of all clothes are made of polyester or other petroleum-based synthetics, which is essentially plastic, and therefore super cheap, but when we wash the garments, microfibres are released, and they, and never biodegrade," says the fashion journalist Dana Thomas, author of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of  Clothes. 

"None of this is exclusive to Shein, but Shein is a major part of the problem. It joined the game late, when all of these issues were already well documented. So the company's founding executives knew better. But they chose to put the promise of mega-profits ahead of predictable and avoidable damage." 

Somehow, Shein still claims that its business model is sustainable, mostly because the brand tests new products in small batches and only mass produces after a positive response from customers. And yes, the result is a wasted inventory in the single digits (high street brands often don't sell up to 20 per cent of the clothes they make). "But this is entirely negated by the fact they push overconsumption," says Thomas. "Then they place the environmental impact blame on consumers, which is outrageous."

Amrani adds: "Their clothes are also so cheap that when you try to return them they usually don't want them back, leaving you to dispose of them. Officially, therefore, nothing has gone to waste – even though of course it has."

'A new way of dressing'

The landfill costs associated with fast-fashion have become a talking point, and Shein recently donated $15 million to a charity helping with Ghana's growing garment waste problem. Thomas likens the move to the philanthropy of the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, which has faced US lawsuits regarding overprescription of addictive pharmaceutical drugs. "It's like the Sacklers underwriting opiate rehab centres: here, get hooked on our drugs, make us wildly rich, but we'll help fight the addiction problem by giving a sliver of our profits to a rehab centre to help you get clean. Talk about greenwashing."

The bigger question now is how we educate a generation addicted to cheap clothes. "The problem is it devalues fashion," says Tamara Cincik, founder of think tank Fashion Roundtable. "In the same way Amazon has become an everyday convenience, this fast-fashion model has become the new way of dressing. It's not going to be easy to persuade people to spend £60 on something when they've been trained to think they can get it for £6."

Although their profits are still huge, Shein has seen sales decline in six of the past seven months. And more and more people are now lobbying governments to start properly regulating the industry – although that comes with its own complex set of issues. 

When it comes to changing people's shopping habits, Cincik warns against a hand-wringing, middle-class focus. "We need to be able to cut through to the people who are buying fast fashion: there needs to be a massive educational push about the human and environmental consequences. And it needs to happen soon."

Have you ever bought anything from Shein or are you sceptical to contribute to fast fashion? Join the conversation in the comments section below