++Escaping Twin Flames shows how a self-styled guru turned soul mates into a dangerous form of coercive control. +
++Imagine a group that promises to help you find your soul mate. What could be more pure? +
++When I stumbled across the concept of “twin flames” years ago, my immediate reaction was to roll my eyes: On a niche corner of the web, a community of new age practitioners was trumpeting the idea of an intense cosmic romantic connection, at once both sexual and spiritual, that was stronger than any run-of-the-mill soul mate could ever be. To find your “twin flame,” you had to be uniquely attuned to the universe … or else you had to pay people who claimed to be able to identify your twin flame for you. +
++On its face, this idea might sound like a straightforward scam, the type that often manipulates and commodifies new age practices and beliefs in order to rip off people looking for love. And it was: One “twin flame” guru named Jeff Ayan used the concept to fund a million-dollar lifestyle built from the profits of his (paradoxically not-for-profit) organization, the Twin Flames Universe, or TFU. +
++But the TFU is much more than just a matchmaking service and money-making scheme. Former members of the organization allege Ayan uses cult-like coercion and multilevel marketing tactics to control his followers. Over the course of its three episodes, Escaping Twin Flames gives us a truly disturbing, often shocking glimpse into the hold that Ayan exerts over his “twin flames” community — one that goes far beyond relationship advice toward controlling every aspect of his followers’ lives, with everything from their romantic partners to their gender identities dictated by his whims. +
++While Ayan and his wife Shaleia insist their group isn’t a cult, Escaping Twin Flames will at least ensure that you never think about soul mates in quite the same way again. +
++The “Twin Flame” builds on the double-edged premise of soul mates +
++It’s maybe important to include a disclaimer up top that even if you believe in true love, the way we’re about to discuss soul mates is not real. You’ll quickly see why the idea of a cosmically ordained perfect romantic match that you can literally never escape from can be both damaging and dangerous. +
++Advocates of “twin flames” point to various Hindu teachings and other Asian spiritual practices and writings as evidence that the theme of cosmically aligned soul mates has existed throughout history and across cultures. The specific “twin flame” notion, however, was first popularized in 1999 thanks to American New Age spiritualist Elizabeth Clare Prophet, through her “pocket guide” book, Soul Mates and Twin Flames: The Spiritual Dimension of Love and Relationships. +
++Prophet’s approach to soul mates draws on the Hindu belief in karma and the Buddhist concept of yin and yang, but also fits thoroughly within an evangelical Christian view. She argues, complete with Bible verses, that you can’t find your perfect match until you are aligned with God. “It is our relationship to God and our Higher Self that holds the key to finding and becoming one with our twin flame,” she writes. In other words, one’s twin flame is more than just a soul mate. The relationship is a manifestation of a person’s relationship with the divine, and the two of them are meant to help each other continue along a mutual path to enlightenment. +
++Prophet claims that our separation from our perfect soul mate is a punishment from the divine because of our rebellion against “cosmic law,” so all of us are seeking to get back into the universe’s good graces so we can reunite with our other half. It’s a concept seen everywhere from Plato to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Here, let Marisa Tomei explain. +
++Proponents of “twin flames” have developed even more esoteric versions of Prophet’s particular narrative. One of the most popular threads is the claim that only 144,000 actual “twin flames” exist — so only 72,000 couples throughout history have qualified. The number 144,000 happens to be huge in niche religions, thanks to its significance in the biblical Book of Revelation. It’s also not a whole lot of people, in total. (And if you’re thinking that gatekeeping who gets to be a super-special twin flame is a good way to get people to invest in the notion that they are “chosen” for something rare and divinely ordained, well … just wait.) +
++The core characteristic of Prophet’s vision of the “twin flame” is that it’s permanent. “The thing about this karmic marriage or relationship that you are into is that you can never get out of it,” she writes. “No one in heaven or on earth can separate you from your twin flame.” +
++This proclamation is a double-edged sword: On the one hand, it practically promises the believer a happily ever after, if they can only recognize their twin flame and align themselves accordingly. But on the other, as we’ll soon see, this pressure can potentially be devastating to someone involved in an abusive relationship, who’s then led to believe they’re destined to be tied to that person forever, or anyone on the receiving end of romantic delusion from a true believer who unilaterally determines that person to be their twin flame. +
++Witness one very discomfiting comment on a “twin flame” blog from 2019: “I met my twin soul, and she is 50 years younger than I am … I’m wondering what it means for someone (i.e. my twin soul) so young and inexperienced in this life.” There’s no good outcome at all here, buddy! +
++All of this is the general backdrop to the “twin flame” phenomenon. It sets the stage for the entry into the field of a self-styled guru who learned about “twin flames” from his girlfriend and then turned it into — well. You’ll see. +
++It only takes one shaky spiritual concept and a manipulative guru to make a coercively controlled group +
++Jeff Ayan studied business at Western Michigan University before moving to Hawaii in his early 20s, where he went by the name Ender Ayanethos and styled himself as a “lifestyle design entrepreneur.” His decade-old website, with its assertions that “His mission is to inspire you to live a conscious, heart-centered lifestyle now,” reads like a spiritual leader in training, while his contemporaneous social media, with mantras including “I always get what I want” and “I’m a leader, and when I express my ideas I’m just describing my reality. I’m not concerned with anyone’s approval,” implies a more dominant, assertive side to his personality. +
++Ayan met Shaleia — real name Megan Plante — online in the early 2010s. They quickly married and moved to Michigan. According to YouTube videos the couple made, as shown in the documentary, Shaleia first introduced Jeff to a number of new age practices like tarot reading and twin flames, which he quickly adopted. Although Shaleia was the one who introduced Jeff to the concept, Jeff has clearly made himself the unquestioned leader of the Twin Flames group. +
++The relationship between Jeff and Shaleia is intended to be the biggest draw of their Twin Flames Universe community. By branding themselves as the perfect couple, they’re also marketing their relationship as something they can teach others to have, and as vloggers they cultivated a steady audience. Since they created their YouTube channel in 2014 (styling themselves as “Jeff and Shaleia Divine”), they’ve gained nearly 30,000 subscribers and garnered over 3 million views. The TFU Facebook group reportedly boasts 40,000 members and counting — members who may have been drawn in simply because they were searching for information about love and attraction to people outside of the group. +
++Their success led to the publication of a book about twin flames and a coterie of coaching services for those interested in pursuing the “twin flame” path, all marketed under the group Twin Flames Universe. As taught by Ayan, the idea of finding a “twin flame” rapidly evolved into a whole lifestyle largely dictated by his teachings and trainings. And these trainings were expensive. As reported by Sarah Berman and Sian Bradley for Vice in 2020 and 2021, respectively, costs to participate in TFU courses and workshops ranged from $699 to $4,000, and came with intense pressure to level up. +
++It’s impossible to overstate what an abrasive personality Ayan has, as captured extensively on film in Escaping Twin Flames. He frequently speaks in a grating, mocking voice. He asserts to queer members of the group that queer identity isn’t real, and appears unfazed when members break down sobbing in conference calls. He berates, interrupts, and belittles group members, including his wife, whom he often talks down to and forbids from speaking. At one point, he describes throwing Shaleia down on the bed and forcing himself on her. +
++The Jeff/Shaleia bond is supposed to be the glue keeping the group together. In reality, the documentary captures video after video of Shaleia sitting silent, only to be immediately shot down or talked over when she does speak up. Their relationship comes across as anything but idyllic; if anything, it frequently seems strained and forced. +
++Ayan allegedly instructs members of the group to aggressively pursue their purported other halves at all costs. The thinking goes that being someone’s “twin flame” trumps everything else happening in your life — even if you never agreed to be co-opted into the “twin flame” concept to begin with. In Escaping Twin Flames, when one group member is dealing with the fact that her alleged twin flame is a man who was living in another state, in a relationship with another woman, and about to have a baby, Ayan tells her, “None of that fucking matters.” +
++According to one former TFU member, multiple members of the group had restraining orders because Ayan essentially encouraged them to become stalkers and to “aggressively pursue” the object of their affection. When she received a restraining order, she alleges, Ayan and other TFU coaches told her the restraining order didn’t actually exist, implying that she could overcome it with her mind. +
++Jeff and Shaleia Ayan have repeatedly insisted, both in statements to Vice as well as statements posted on their website (and included as disclaimers at the end of each episode of the Netflix series) that they are not a cult and do not engage in cult-like practices. +
++Yet Ayan’s attempts to insist he wasn’t a cult leader actually drove some members to the opposite realization. “Jeff told us to watch Seduced and The Vow and write a whole essay as to why Jeff is not a cult leader,” a former coach named Keely says in the documentary. “Every point we were coming across when we were doing this research was pointing to the fact that he was, in fact, a cult leader.” +
++In fact, over the course of Escaping Twin Flames, Ayan does a litany of things that are a veritable bingo card of cult tropes: +
+-
+
- +He insists that only he, out of everyone on Earth, is enlightened enough to tell who a person’s twin flame is. Cult leaders nearly always purport to have a special spiritual power that makes them unique out of all other spiritual guides. + +
- +He separates members from their families, often by convincing them that their families have been abusive to them. This is a classic form of cult control. The documentary series introduces us to a support group of mothers who have all been fully or nearly entirely separated from their children due to their involvement in the group. + +
- +He institutes a rigorously controlled lifestyle regimen, dictating everything from how members should eat and exercise to when/if they should get married. One couple, who ultimately wind up leaving the group together, get married after just two months of dating after Ayan tells them they are soul mates. + +
- +He creates a system of isolation that deems anyone not in the Twin Flames Universe community a suspicious or unenlightened person who isn’t to be trusted. This is described as “energy leaks” in the series — the idea that any energy you give toward anyone who’s not your twin flame or not a member of the community is wasted, a “leak.” + +
- +He claims, as countless cult leaders have, to be the reincarnation of Jesus. As Ayan leans more into the idea of Twin Flames Universe as a religious non-profit, he increasingly styles himself to resemble Jesus, growing his hair long and remarking on his resemblance to the biblical representation of Christ. (Ayan is white, and not Jewish.) + +
- +He facilitates “healing” sessions that emphasize personal failings and serve as an ongoing form of coercive control. This is similar to the process of many other cults, such as Scientology’s infamous auditing sessions. Former TFU members report being forced to do healing sessions that last up to 24 hours. These sessions as well as a routine practice called the “mirror exercise” are designed to keep members in a constant state of turbulence and upheaval, excavating personal trauma and issues that may or may not be real, all in order to maintain a state of crisis and further dependence and reliance on the guidance of Ayan, the coaches, and other members of the group. According to the docuseries, Ayan presents members’ personal problems as manifestations of how broken and damaged they are as individuals. + +
- +He arranges relationships and marriages within the group, essentially ordering certain members to get together by virtue of telling them that they are one another’s twin flames. The entire concept of a “twin flame” is that it’s unique and permanent, and the entire basis for Ayan’s alleged spiritual powers is that he is the only one who can identify a person’s unique permanent cosmically ordained twin flame. Yet multiple members are initially informed that their twin flame is one person, only to have Jeff change his mind and assign them a different twin flame, often after the first person has left the group. + +
- +He pressures members to invest more and more money in the program, either by “leveling up” to become a more central part of the organization, or by purchasing yet another product offered by the group. While he and Shaleia bragged about driving Porsches, living in a mansion, and wearing designer fashion, they encouraged members to shell out thousands of dollars to purchase group materials and training sessions. One former TFU member reports spending $20,000 just to become a certified TFU coach. + +
+“Those who stayed ended up going deeper and deeper,” one former TFU member says in the documentary. +
++In one aspect, The Twin Flames Universe community goes much further than typical cults might: Ayan insists that certain members are either “spiritually masculine” or “spiritually feminine,” and that they need to accept and express their true gender. This pressure frequently escalates into pressure for members to convert to a different gender expression altogether. Since Ayan denies the existence of homosexuality and nonbinary identity, this trick makes it easier for him to more effectively arrange relationships between members of the community, most of whom are women. +
++It also, of course, is an extreme form of coercive control, and it can’t be overstated that the modes of coercion in this group have nothing to do with actual trans identity. Indeed, one former member of TFU who is trans left the group because she saw through Ayan’s attempts to coerce members into artificially changing their gender expressions. Another former member named Angie found herself first being pressured to accept that she was “spiritually masculine” and to dress and style herself as increasingly butch. After developing a crush on another woman in the group, this escalated into pressure to live and present as a man, including changing her name. Angie finally broke and left the group, resuming life as a cisgender woman. +
++One of the most heartwrenching stories recounted in Escaping Twin Flames concerns a young woman named Marlee who joined the group at the age of 19, only to be told by Ayan that her twin flame was a random stranger who had messaged her on Facebook. The man turned out to be 11 years older than Marlee, with no job, severe mental health problems, and a criminal record. Nevertheless, Ayan coerced Marlee into moving to a different state in order to be with him, even though in her own words, “I did not like this guy; he was creepy.” In one video early in their relationship, a sobbing Marlee relates the criminal problems her new twin flame is having, clearly distraught. “Everyone has issues,” a supremely unbothered Ayan tells her. “You should look at this as the prequel to your union.” After living like this for three years, Marlee ultimately concludes that “the person who I thought was my twin flame was just some random guy I was forced to be with.” +
++Other TFU members were coerced into moving across states to live with their twin flames, even if they’d just met. Some were coerced into changing their names or getting gender reassignment surgery or other related surgery. The group also seems to institute hierarchies of abuse, with higher-level coaches passing along to newer members the abusive tactics and orders Ayan used on them. One member, according to the documentary, died by suicide shortly after joining the group. The group, according to Escaping Twin Flames, disclaims that it’s not a mental health treatment group, but internally enforces the idea that members should look to its teachings for all their mental wellness. +
++It’s important to remember that higher-up members of TFU are most likely also subject to intense forms of coercive control and persuasive tactics that keep them from questioning their role in the group too deeply. But there is hope. Nearly all of the former TFU members featured in Escaping Twin Flames, including several members in positions of authority, departed from the group after exposés of the group appeared in Vice and other media outlets. The impact of Escaping Twin Flames debuting at No. 1 on the Netflix Top 10 in its first week of release can’t be overstated. Even if it can’t reach everyone who’s committed to the Ayans and their community, perhaps it will reach the next person looking for cosmic answers to life’s questions — before they become a target for a self-styled guru with anything but divine intentions. +
++It isn’t classist to say that Americans do not need hauls of dozens of garments. +
++In a marketplace full of seemingly infinite choices, every piece of clothing purchased could be construed as a moral quagmire. Are you a bad person if you buy leather? What about vegan leather? Conversations about the relative importance of various, often opposed ethical concerns are rightly packed with tough, worthwhile questions and considerations. +
++There are a million and one lines to draw, all dependent on a person’s particular value system. But there’s one clear-cut distinction that anyone should be able to understand: We can all do more to buy less (or, ideally, nothing) from fast fashion giants. +
++When you say something like this in public, though, there are a few types of pushback, with differing degrees of validity and popularity. One of the most common — and effective — is that fast fashion is accessible. This is true and entirely to the point. Fast fashion is accessible to people of lower incomes, and often accessible to people in a range of sizes — two extensive problems in the fashion industry. With fast fashion, people who otherwise might not be able to can express themselves through trends. This is, in a vacuum, a nice thing. +
++This nice thing also exists in a much broader and more complicated context. +
++Academics, human rights activists, and experts who work in fashion and sustainability have spent years sounding the alarm: Clothing overconsumption is awful for the environment and hurts the poorest of the world’s poor. The boom of fast fashion — the breakneck business model where retailers mimic trendy runway or streetwear looks to mass produce them at lower price points — has normalized a culture of constantly buying new clothes without thinking twice about the consequences to other people, animals, or the planet at large. +
+ ++Every piece of clothing comes with two costs: the one we pay as consumers and the actual one, which takes into account the climate effects of production and shipping and the impact on the people who make the production and shipping possible. If a T-shirt retails for $5, what does that say about the wage of its constructor and of the materials that went into making it? +
++Companies are incentivized to cut corners when it comes to paying workers fairly, sourcing materials ethically, and ensuring the living conditions of animals. I’ve previously written about how our stuff — from blenders and bras to telephones and tractors — has gotten worse in the last decade because of the corporate pursuit of overproduction and overconsumption. Given the speed needed to keep up with trends, it’s not physically possible to quickly mass produce something that is of a decent quality, ethically made, and affordable. +
++The problems endemic to the fashion industry, however, are relatively under-discussed, and there’s a reluctance among consumers to take a good, hard look at their own purchasing habits. There isn’t enough clear information about the environmental or human rights impacts, the topic of fashion itself is seen by some as shallow, and the discussion is frequently derailed by related conversations. It’s not simple — nor is it solely our individual responsibility when policymakers and brands can step up — but none of that means we have to buy into a narrative that normalizes a culture of overconsumption. +
++“Clothing isn’t frivolous. It’s something that touches every human being on the planet,” said JD Shadel, editor-at-large at Good on You, a fashion evaluator site. “I don’t think we have a right to transgress the human rights of other individuals for our own stylishness. Fast fashion has sold us the lie that to be a whole person, we need more cheap clothes, and that’s not true.” +
++Fast fashion is bad, but some brands are worse than others +
++Americans already have pretty full closets. +
++In 2018, the average American bought 68 items of clothing, with the majority of it going barely worn, Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman told the New Yorker. That figure was before the rise of Shein, the Chinese mega-retailer that outputs thousands of new, cheaply made styles a day, alongside brands like Boohoo, Cider, Princess Polly, and Fashion Nova. The mall staples of yesteryear, your Forever 21s and Zaras, pale in comparison to the magnitude of e-commerce behemoths (though they’re not blameless). If social media is any indication, with influencers and everyday people alike touting monthly “hauls” of clothing, it wouldn’t be surprising if Americans were buying significantly more than 68 garments a year today. +
++We can estimate how many clothes Americans buy. We can calculate how many garments are ending up in landfills globally. What’s harder is knowing how many pieces are being produced industry-wide. Only 12 percent of brands publicly disclose the number of products made annually, according to the 2023 Fashion Transparency Index report from nonprofit Fashion Revolution. If we went along with the largest approximation of 150 billion articles of clothing per year, which could honestly still be on the conservative side, the sheer scale reveals something unsettling: There are way too many clothes for the 8.1 billion people on the planet. +
++“There’s an inherent flaw in fashion’s business model that does not value the products it makes,” Holly Syrett, the impact programs and sustainability director at Global Fashion Agenda, wrote to Vox in an email. “Looking at all market segments of fashion, figures indicate that just 30 percent of clothing made is sold at full price, 30 percent of clothing is sold at discount, and another 30 percent not sold at all.” +
++Meanwhile, you can see the world’s textile waste from space. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, almost 800 acres of unused and no longer loved clothing sits to rot. The mostly polyester-laden fast fashion shipped from the US, Europe, and Asia will take centuries to decompose. Unlike, say, food waste (a similar problem), those synthetic fibers can’t be easily composted the way a pomegranate can be. So that slinky going-out dress from 2016 will either slowly disintegrate, leeching its chemicals into nearby water systems, or be burned to create space, which in turn shoots chemicals into the air. +
++Waste is only one of the environmental downsides of the fashion industry. Synthetic materials made from fossil fuels like polyester, nylon, and acrylic contribute chemical byproducts to the air, water systems, and soil that are difficult to contain. Natural fibers — cotton, wool, silk, leather — require massive quantities of land and water use, not to mention the animal welfare of it all. The fashion industry is also a significant source of pollution. A recent estimate from the United Nations calculates the fashion industry is responsible for anywhere between 2 to 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. At this pace, the industry’s share of emissions could surge by 50 percent by 2030, according to the World Bank. +
++There’s plenty to be worried about here for the future, but what and how much we buy also hurts people today. The fashion industry employs some 60 million people in the production of textiles and apparel globally, and it can feel like an understatement to say that not everyone is paid fairly. Most countries in the Global North outsource their labor to developing countries like Bangladesh or Vietnam due to a lack of regulations that protect labor. The garment workers responsible for stitching a pair of leggings together or knitting a warm sweater work long hours in terrible conditions for little pay in order to make cheap clothes possible. +
++The industry wage gap — the average percentage gap between minimum wages and the average living wage — across key producing countries has also increased to 48.5 percent, with many workers receiving less than half of the money they need to reach a living wage. Women and children along the supply chain see even lower wages. +
++Fast fashion and its discontents have been on the rise since the 2000s, with criticism aimed at brands like H&M and Zara. Not even other mall favorites, like the Gap or Abercrombie & Fitch, are spared as they, too, overproduce. But right now, one of the biggest players in the game is Shein. It leads the e-commerce pack in terms of its production, environmental impacts, and disregard for worker well-being. The overconsumption encouraged by Shein and its ilk essentially put the industry on steroids. +
++Sheng Lu, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies the apparel industry, analyzed Shein’s output compared to other fast-fashion retailers in 2022. He told Wired that in a 12-month period, Gap had around 12,000 different styles; H&M had approximately 25,000; and Zara clocked in around 35,000. Shein had 1.3 million. Mind you, that’s not the total number of individual garments, but the number of styles. +
++Shein’s pricing is also a differentiator. More than 1,000 people bought this $2.69 brown crop top. You could also buy a $3 shirt featuring Santa hitting a dab, a $5 nightdress, or an $11 men’s zip-up sweater. In no world do those prices make any logical sense, but they do allow consumers to normalize low price tags and buy a high volume of low-quality products. +
++Despite being around for more than a decade, Shein didn’t take off internationally until TikTok did, plus the onslaught of pandemic impulse purchases that happened around the same time. Shein experienced massive growth extremely quickly, operating more than 6,000 factories (including in western China, the site of the Uyghur genocide). +
++Shein’s scale makes its harms markedly worse. There are media reports of several human rights violations, including workers needing to clock in for back-to-back 18-hour days, with no weekends, in order to make a living wage. A 2022 investigation by UK publication iNews alleges that workers are paid as little as 0.03694 cents per item. Living wages with this kind of payout are impossible unless tons of clothes are made. +
++The lies we tell ourselves about fast fashion +
++Recently, I watched a TikTok where a foodie influencer touted a cute screen-printed shirt she’d recently purchased from a local brand. One of her followers scolded her for buying a $40-something top. “How can you share an expensive top to your college student audience?” the follower asked. +
++$40 isn’t nothing. But once you factor in labor, production costs, and overhead, it’s hard to say that it isn’t an ethical, reasonable price for a shirt. As Aja Barber, author of Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism, explained to Vox in an interview, the vast majority of people, especially young folks, do not know what things actually cost. +
++“We need to educate the younger generations because they don’t really know what a world looks like without fast fashion,” Barber told me. “We can’t blame them for not knowing.” Barber likes to do a thought experiment, asking people how much they’d like to be paid hourly. Garment workers, she points out, deserve a living wage, too — and hey, guess how long that T-shirt takes to make? +
++Today, to say that something should cost more is considered by some to be classist. A go-to argument for many fast-fashion proponents, according to the experts I spoke with, is that buying from a retailer like Shein is a necessity because it has the most affordable, new, trendy clothing. Being poor limits your options, so how else could you keep up with the Joneses? Similar arguments have been lobbed when it comes to anti-fat bias — that it’s discriminatory to tell people not to shop from a brand that might have cheaper options for larger clothes in an industry notorious for producing limited size ranges. +
++These arguments are ultimately just noise. America’s lower classes are not the ones with an overconsumption problem. One-off purchases aren’t meaningfully helping Shein reach the $100 billion evaluation milestone. It’s the folks who take advantage of low prices to buy more than they need or will ever use. When advocates talk about how people should buy less or buy nothing from fast-fashion companies, they’re not telling poor people that they don’t need stuff or that people with bigger bodies should go naked. Instead, that advice is intended for those who have the luxury of choice. “If someone is talking about affordability, then they should be asking themselves, what are they buying for?” Barber said. +
++This also doesn’t change the fact that poverty in the US, while horrific and unacceptable, pales in comparison to the everyday reality of those in the Global South. More likely than not, middle- and upper-class overconsumers are hiding behind the shield of affordability rather than simply acknowledging their culpability in the harms caused by the industry. +
++“It’s a core American problem that a lot of Americans are unable to see beyond themselves,” said Cora Harrington, a lingerie expert and critic of fast fashion. “One thing that just jumps out in such startling clarity when you’re discussing companies like Shein is that people say they’re the most victimized and oppressed people in this equation. The notion that people are not being paid fairly, that people work in dangerous conditions, that people are exploited to make your $6 bathing suits don’t even enter the equation of what they see as oppression.” +
++Having access to a glut of cheap clothes in order to be fashionable isn’t a human right, nor is it a requirement to express yourself. As political theorist John Stuart Mill posited a little more than two centuries ago, your rights end the moment they infringe upon and harm the rights of others. “If it comes at a cost to another human, is it right?” Barber asked. “Are we entitled to cheap clothing at the cost of other humans? That’s the question. I think we all know what the answer is deep down inside.” +
++How fast fashion sells itself (and what to do about it) +
++To be clear, it is not simply that consumers are lying to themselves so they can feel good about their purchases: A whole misinformation machine is at work, thanks to the fashion industry. +
++As Shadel explained to Vox, brand evasion makes everything more complicated: “It’s really hard for a consumer who wants to put their values at the center of their spending and vote with their wallets if you don’t know if this brand is profiting off of forced labor and wage exploitation.” +
++Fast-fashion brands take advantage of the overwhelming difficulty of knowing and proving what’s going on behind closed doors. For a lot of the most devoted buyers, no amount of outside evidence will be enough. “How can I stand against them if I don’t have anything to back it up?” a Shein fan told the New York Times last year. +
++And when independent evidence points toward unglamorous truth, as was the case with Shein’s factories, well … just fly a bunch of influencer “partners” on an international trip to scope out a mostly empty “innovation factory.” In late June, six influencers were shown a facility in Guangzhou, China, and made a series of videos, espousing the merits of the brand. Naturally, the gullible influencers were dunked on left and right. +
++“The China trip has been one of the most life-changing trips of my life,” said influencer Dani Carbonari in a now-deleted video defending the excursion, where she emphasized her “surprise” at the “rumors” spread in the US. “My biggest takeaway from this trip is to be an independent thinker — get the facts and see it with your own two eyes.” +
++Ironically or not, this is the takeaway we should all have when it comes to companies like Shein: to think smarter about our own habits and use the data we have available. We have to remember that clothing hasn’t historically been this cheap; it’s only a recent development in the last few decades. “Fashion didn’t always used to be fast fashion and ultra-fast fashion,” Shadel said. “That’s not to say it was always perfect, but it’s a lot worse now in a lot of ways. And so we can change the system because it’s not inherent.” +
++The responsibility for real and lasting change lies with corporations and governments. There’s no easy one-size-fits-all solution, no magic polyester blend made of recycled water bottles, no number of trees planted that will gloss over the need for systemic reconstruction and reimagining. Some initiatives, like promoting a circular economy or regularly releasing reports of factory conditions, are moves in the right direction. Crucially, what’s needed is a deep shift in the current business model — and that will take time, collaboration, and pressure across the industry. +
++The good news is that we’re making progress. The EU has passed several initiatives targeting reporting standards, accountability for human rights and environmental regulations, and textile waste. In the US, there’s the New York Fashion Act, a proposed law that will require accountability to standardized environmental and social due diligence policies. +
++Still, the crushing wheel of bureaucracy and lack of international agreement about what accountability should look like remain roadblocks in shifting fast fashion’s business model at scale. So that leaves us, the consumer. +
++If there’s one thing we can do, immediately and easily, it’s stop lying to ourselves that we need these brands, that we deserve to have this much stuff, that our wants and desires stateside are more important than the lives of people across the globe or the future of our planet. We can just admit that fast fashion is not a good thing. +
++“If we don’t get a grip on this, nobody’s going to care in 10 years about your Shein haul,” Barber said. “We can either fix the system, or we can just drive the car until the wheels fall off.” +
++I learned the hard way I couldn’t shop my way to a new self. +
++The pile of recycling in the corner of my kitchen was taller than the counter at some points in the month. The precariously stacked boxes from Amazon, the Gap, Williams Sonoma, and direct-to-consumer brands I had found on TikTok threatened to fall over, though that didn’t stop me from adding another to the top when a new supposedly life-changing package arrived at my doorstep. +
++I didn’t realize that I was revenge shopping — a term that explains the way people spend compulsively on less-than-necessary consumer goods to make up for lost time after a period of being denied the opportunity to shop. It became hugely popular about a year into the pandemic, with millennials and Gen Z reporting that they were spending $1,016 more per month in 2021 than they were in the summer prior. By the time I hit my shopping peak, it was late 2021. Like many others at that time, I was bored of sitting at home in the same clothes. Perhaps more importantly, I was bored with myself and I couldn’t find another way out of the life I was living. +
++Shopping made it easy to envision myself in a new life — one where, instead of working a series of dead-end jobs and hardly leaving my apartment, I was always surrounded by friends, eating at the best restaurant in my city, and casually wearing the perfectly put-together outfit that would reify me as a Hot Girl. +
++As I came to see much later, shopping never delivered on that promise. There was never an end in sight — only new opportunities to reinvent myself. If I was constantly trying on something new, there would never be a moment to ask myself who I actually was, or to even consider why I was so scared of the question itself. That would’ve required me to make changes I wasn’t ready for: to go out and meet new people, to quit the job that made me feel unappreciated and less-than, to look in the mirror and accept that this just may be what I look like, and that’s okay. Until I faced that fear, there was only recycling piling up, a flash of guilt or shame as I broke down the boxes, and the quickly returning urge to buy my way out of being unhappy. Month after month, I flipped myself like an old house with decent bones, hoping a new layer of shiplap or subway tile backsplash would cover up what I wanted to hide. +
++A short scroll on TikTok or Instagram Reels will present you with thousands of different single-use tools that purportedly deliver the ultimate life hacks, must-have “staple pieces” for your closet that’ll “never go out of style,” and skin care products that will make your face glow and pores shrink. In these videos, people with blown-out hair and shockingly white teeth tell you about that one Amazon item that improved their entire life — whether it’s a jade roller that “de-puffed” their face or the dress that has fulfilled their lifelong aesthetic goals. As you sift through video after video, watching before-and-afters or step-by-step outfit tutorials, it’s easy to start believing them. I certainly did. +
++Rarely do these videos mention the psychological impacts of continuous shopping, or the environmental ones. US consumers now have about five times more clothing in their closet than in the 1980s, despite the fact that many items will only be worn once; in the US alone, over 34 billion pounds of textiles are thrown out each year, meaning that each resident produces roughly 100 pounds of textile waste per year. While it can be easy to downplay individual responsibility to combat climate change when considering the more significant role that large corporations play in creating waste, our consumption habits still have a measurable impact on the environment. The hard truth: The more you buy, the more that companies create to buy, and the more you are willing to throw away and replace. +
++Through our consumption, we are complicit in this vicious cycle, while it’s the large corporations behind the products and the influencers marketing them that stand to gain the most. Influencers using the popular online shopping platform LTK sold over $3.6 billion worth of products in 2022 alone, according to the company’s numbers. +
++At the height of my revenge shopping, I prioritized figuring out my “aesthetic” rather than leveraging any power I could have as a conscious consumer. I spent weeks mindlessly scrolling — and shopping. I bought flared leather pants, and a couple of weeks later I found myself thinking they were cringe. I succumbed to the Shein haul, a TikTok trend in which one buys copious amounts of low-cost clothing from the Chinese fast fashion giant, to buy all new bathing suits before a trip to the beach with friends, and still felt self-conscious about my body in nearly all of the photos. The algorithm served me countless videos of girls each discovering their own hyper-specific look — tomato girls who shined wearing reds and neutrals, cottagecore girls who preferred baking bread and wearing loose linens. Their smiles told me: I’ve figured out who I am, and I feel lighter because of it. +
++I tried on a “clean girl” aesthetic, and then the “model off duty” one, but my hair seemed too unmanageable for either. I recalled the videos I had seen during my hours of scrolling, of proud “curly girl” influencers who created entire careers around their perfect hair, whose comment sections were filled with endless compliments. So that’s my problem, I thought again and again, as I purchased the supposed solutions on their Amazon storefronts: $40 conditioner, $75 hair gel, a $35 Denman brush. When my curls still broke apart and fell out of place, I thought it must be my fault, and I turned back to the app for advice (and more product recommendations). +
++Buying matching athleisure sets was going to make me work out every day. A detailed planner was going to make me more productive. Each purchase offered a second of control, in the face of mounting, overwhelming insecurity. Despite how bad I felt whenever I discovered a new problem in need of fixing, seeking out signals online to tell me how to behave felt natural; it was far from the first time the internet molded how I lived my life. +
++I was in seventh grade when Instagram came out, and my childhood best friend and I were early adopters. We didn’t know then that our blurry pictures of our backyards or our Starbucks cups with sepia-toned filters were an introduction into a digital panopticon — one that opened us up to a world of strangers in addition to the already steep judgment of our peers. +
++By the time I was in college in the mid- to late 2010s, I was self-conscious about posting twice in the same outfit — especially in posts too close to each other on my profile. The problem was that I barely had enough cash to cover necessities like school supplies, food, and toiletries. By making the ill-advised decision to attend a private school I couldn’t afford, and to live among people who could afford it, I had put myself on a stage that I wasn’t ready for. I felt like I was performing an improv show — attempting to convince my peers that, in my empty hand, there was really the latest iPhone and that I wasn’t wearing the same pair of threadbare leggings every day. +
++Not long after the pandemic hit, I realized I had more money in my bank account than ever before. I had found a slightly higher-paying work-from-home job, so I wasn’t commuting or taking Ubers anywhere, I wasn’t going out to bars, and I wasn’t eating out at any restaurants. At first, I was responsible; I took some time to set aside an emergency fund, and I opened a retirement account. But when I still had funds left over from my paycheck, I started shopping. +
++Suddenly, I had access to a world that I felt I had previously been denied entry to. For many groups of women, including my friends, shopping is a collaborative activity: You wait outside the dressing room to give one friend your honest opinions on her look; you say, “Just do it, you deserve it,” when another asks if she should splurge. Virtually, you send a link to the group chat when your favorite store is having a sale or a video of your most recent haul. +
++When I was younger, this was a bonding experience I couldn’t as readily participate in without feeling immense financial anxiety. Now, I was far from meeting any of my long-term financial goals, but the opportunity to avenge my younger self was tantalizingly within reach. Finally, I could buy the same signifiers that had always told me someone else had it all together, without actually needing to have it all together: porcelain pasta blates from Sur La Table, jeans in every wash and cut, a puffer jacket with North Face emblazoned on the front. +
++In the process, I built up a graveyard of things hardly worn, hardly looked at — my very own pigeon’s nest of lightly used garbage that I swore I would donate (and, more excitingly, replace). But the pile presented a problem. It made it difficult to explain why, with so many options, I still felt like I had nothing to wear. Why nothing felt right or comfortable or like “me” except for a couple of sweaters that I had stolen from my boyfriend or a few pairs of jeans that I had worn into the ground. Eventually, the prospect of attempting yet again to find and buy more stuff to make these feelings go away started to feel exhausting rather than exciting. +
++Shopping didn’t give me freedom or agency. By placing me on a conveyor belt where I was constantly tasked with keeping up with the latest trends, it took control away from me. The ease with which many of us can shop now — through the same digital panopticon that encourages us to always present ourselves as something new — is a quick comfort. It’s easy to feel that way when you are trapped under flooding Brooklyns, global pandemics, and threats of international war. It’s also a double-edged sword. It’s true, shopping can provide a dopamine hit that feels like a momentary break from the life you’re living in. But if you’re constantly taking that break when you feel unsatisfied and insecure, you are letting the muscle that deals with the negative parts of your life atrophy. When do you actually start accepting who you are? At what point are you living your life, instead of planning for a new reinvention of it? +
++Deep into my shopping spiral, I started experiencing reinvention fatigue. There was no epiphany, only a gradual decline until I felt less happy, and less like myself, than ever. Half of the clothes in my closet looked like they belonged to a stranger, and I was tired of pantomiming trends set by people being paid to create them. (I mean, when was I ever going to wear that Y2K-inspired backless top from American Eagle or the “SHEIN Knot Strap Ruched Bust Shirred Back Ditsy Floral Top?”) +
++Even though I had more money than before, I hadn’t gotten any better at my performance of happiness or of what I perceived to be normal. Not to mention, I felt less creative than ever. I was still in the same rut I had been in when the pandemic started, but now I was down hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Shopping helped me turn my brain off, but deciding to close the tab of an online cart filled with things I didn’t actually need made me realize that I didn’t want to be off anymore. I can’t deny that I still miss the boxes arriving on my doorstep, but every time I go out in an outfit I’ve worn dozens of times before, it feels like a small win, an acknowledgment that I am consciously accepting who I am and where I’m at. +
++When I was younger, I felt stuck with what I had: frizzy hair, hand-me-down clothes, glasses that never sat completely straight on my face. Like most teens and young adults, I was deeply insecure, and I blamed that on the fact that I couldn’t buy things like my friends could. But, in the same way that revenge shopping didn’t help me today, having more stuff wouldn’t have helped me then, either. This is a realization I didn’t come to until I actually stopped shopping — especially in the moments that I really, really wanted to, when I was feeling the most restless, the most desperate for an easy way out. It was in those moments that I had the opportunity to reckon with what made me uncomfortable or unhappy with myself, and to make changes. To write, or go on a walk outside, or call one of my friends and have a long conversation. +
++Remembering all the times from my younger years when I yearned for a different life, a different closet, a different body, I now think: The fact that I was forced to stick with what I had wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. And I’m proud that, even though I didn’t have much choice, I was able to be myself through it all. As an adult, I’m trying to return to that. +
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