Daily-Dose

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From New Yorker

From Vox

In that moment, I wanted to climb into a hole and pull the hole inside with me. I wanted nothing more than to disappear.

Dean had been a friend in my writing group, a hilarious, caring writer, singer, and actor who was unafraid to speak his mind. A handsome man in his 60s, with close-cropped hair and a frame more chiseled than that of many 20-somethings, he brought character to every event lucky enough to have him. There was no final embrace, no last laugh, no goodbye.

Then, the week after Dean died, I caught the virus myself.

When I first started having chest pains and shortness of breath, I called 911.

“How old are you?” asked the person on the other end.

“I’m 33,” I wheezed. “I live at 2070 —”

“We can’t come get you, sir. I’m sorry. Goodbye.” I was too young to get a bed. There was a shortage.

Days passed without me. My fits produced dry-coughing so hard that it turned into dry- heaving. When I didn’t feel like I was drowning, I began to hallucinate. I saw someone without a face floating outside my window. The person would beckon me to join. I believed that my world was an illusion, that the real world lay nine stories below, and I had to drop to the pavement in order to have my blinders uncovered. Maybe the pavement was where I’d get peace, rest. I really missed Dean, and I wondered if he’d experienced this exhaustion, my exhaustion, right before he crossed over. Boy, was I tired.

But I put it off.

I dusted off a copy of a game I hadn’t seen in a while, though I barely had any energy to play it: Mass Effect 2.

I didn’t think Mass Effect 2 would do much for me when I first bought it back in 2013. The game was cheap; with my GameStop PowerUp Rewards discount, it came to $4.99. I’d read somewhere that the game was one of the best for the seventh generation of gaming consoles (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii), and I thought it’d be an interesting buy.

At first glance, novices to the Mass Effect franchise might think it’s gamer porn for Star Trek geeks. (“Oh, you can have sex with a squid woman on your video box? Nerd!”) It does get kinda geeky. Biotics and warp drives are a huge part of the trilogy. And various races, some of which look like squids and lizards, populate every galaxy.

Now, in 2020, the gloom and loneliness made the walls close in. I tuned back into ME2 as I alternated between hot and cold, sweaty and refrigerated. It got to the point I didn’t feel safe not playing the game. It existed in reality, even when I didn’t. Nightmares led to restless days — filled only by feeding my cat, drinking water, and playing. I lost 30 pounds in two weeks.

The first time I’d played the game, I hadn’t spent time searching for every secret, building up the stats of the player-character, or paying attention to the volumes of lore written in notes. But now, all I had was time on my hands and the demons of my consciousness to keep me company.

You play as Commander Shepard, a customizable character who can be male or female. The game starts with your death. After saving most of your crew, you go down with the ship and burn to a crisp upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Then the plot thickens and you find yourself brought back to life by a mysterious organization, placed in charge of a ship with a ragtag bunch of human and alien misfits and outcasts, and sent on life-threatening and life- saving missions, all for the sake of humanity. (And sometimes for the sake of aliens, if you have the time.) Maybe next time you play, you’ll make different decisions.

Because unlike real life, Mass Effect 2 has replayability.

Gamers will go on and on about how great a game is if you can come back to it more than once. It’s in our nature to keep completing games we really enjoy. By the time I got over Covid, I’d love ME2 enough to replay it over 12 times.

Through Mass Effect 2, I had to make decisions that impacted not only the crew of the Normandy but entire civilizations. Themes of religion, racism, immigration, reform, starvation, epidemics, and war are played out on a scale grander than those on our tiny blue marble. One of the most heartbreaking stories for me is about a population of child beggars. As a kid who grew up in Chicago’s projects, this side story really caught me off guard, and I found myself sobbing. It was about homeless children called duct rats who often don’t live to see adulthood. I’ve never met another person who lived to make it out of the projects I come from.

“I left some food outside your door, Alex,” said my neighbor Robert, over the phone, near the end of my fourth week with Covid. “Security told me you might have the virus. I guess they didn’t wanna come up here to find out.”

Robert’s kindness reminded me of kindness in the real world.

As I started to feel better, I started to speak with friends again, which helped me ease off of ME2. You get attached to the well-drawn characters in the game. When the death of a character happens, the absence is palpable. That’s why I couldn’t give up, because I couldn’t get a redo for those I loved in reality. I’d missed the people I loved. I missed relationships. Hugging. I needed to live to experience those things again.

I thought about something funny Dean and I had done. We watched a movie called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians; it’s even more ridiculous than the title sounds. We Mystery Science Theater 3000’d our way through the whole film, eating popcorn and interrupting the movie to poke fun. We mocked the outfits, the kind of dialogue that’d make Michael Bay cringe, and the kind of camp you’d see on an episode of Adam West’s iteration of Batman.

I laughed at the memory. Laughing had been something I’d forgotten how to do.

Through technology, we’re tapping into a world where games can one day heal people burdened with psychological damage. I’m not saying Mass Effect 2 will do this for you, but it might be worth keeping an eye out for something that could, or for something that at least helps ease the weight.

All I know is that death was on the horizon, so close I was certain I’d be shaking hands with it. Mass Effect 2 felt like the only thing I could take charge of while dealing with a disease and a depression too strong for me. Dean once said to me, “You’re one of the best people I know.” If only he’d known he was the best person I knew. I know he’d be happy I survived.

Alex Miller is a veteran and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and the anthologies The Byline Bible and The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook.

A big part of the US’s response to Covid-19 was strengthening the existing safety net, or providing relief specific to particular types of spending, like food or housing. Food stamp/SNAP benefits were raised. Evictions were barred nationwide for over a year.

But the core of the response was an unprecedentedly large and inclusive set of stimulus checks directly shoveling money to most Americans. In three rounds — March and December 2020 and March 2021 — most adult Americans got $3,200 each, and most American children got $2,500. Then, starting in July 2021, most American children started getting $250 every month, with young kids getting $300 a month.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images
Lawmakers celebrate the signing of the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, on March 10.

These are broad-based policies with only quite wealthy Americans excluded from benefits. The first round of stimulus payments, for instance, were available to 93 percent of Americans, with only the richest 7 percent left out. But unlike stimulus checks passed during the 2001 and 2008 downturns, the 2020-2021 checks were universal at the bottom of the income scale. They had no work requirement or requirement that recipients paid federal taxes in the past.

That means that the stimulus checks should have had a profound effect on poverty this past year or so — and that’s exactly what researchers are finding.

In March, researchers at Columbia led by Zachary Parolin estimated that as a result of President Joe Biden’s stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, the US poverty rate would fall to 8.5 percent, the lowest figure on record and well below 2018’s figure of 12.8 percent. This past month, researchers at the Urban Institute, using a slightly different means of measuring poverty, found that 2021 poverty will be around 7.7 percent, almost a halving relative to 2018’s rate of 13.9 percent per their methodology. (Official US Census poverty statistics for 2020 have not yet been released.)

The Columbia authors find that if you compare 2021 to every year for which the census does have data, from 1967 to 2019, and use a consistent poverty line, 2021 is projected to have the lowest poverty rate on record.

Considering that the US endured a pandemic and economic shock in 2020, these numbers are remarkable.

That’s the big news, and it’s good. It’s important, though, to dig a little deeper into what these studies are projecting — and what it could mean for future policymaking. Much of the credit for lower poverty in their models goes to the stimulus checks. And while the Biden administration hopes to keep the $250/$300 per month checks to parents going, the periodic rounds of stimulus payments during the height of the pandemic were meant to be temporary emergency measures.

That means that, absent further government action, poverty could be set to increase again in 2022.

The good news is that Americans learned a key lesson during the pandemic: Poverty is a policy choice, and it can be easily reduced through increased government support.

The bad news is that the government, particularly swing senators hesitant about spending too much money, might see that choice, and make the wrong one.

How we measure poverty, briefly explained

The convergence of research finding that poverty took a major hit is a big deal. One thing that’s important to understand is that measuring poverty is actually trickier than it might seem. How exactly do you measure it? What counts as poor? And are the metrics researchers set really showing the thing they want to capture?

Take, for instance, the official poverty measure that the government uses. This was developed by the Social Security Administration’s Mollie Orshansky in 1963. Orshanksy defined the income cutoff for poverty as three times the “subsistence food budget” for a family of a given size. That subsistence food budget, in turn, was derived from an “Economy Food Plan” developed by the USDA in 1961, based on data from the 1955 Household Consumption Survey.

In other words, the way we measure poverty in 2021 is based on an analysis from 1963 using data from 1955.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
US Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) speaks to supporters at a rally to extend the eviction moratorium at the US Capitol on August 3.

The official measure has other problems. The way it defines income leaves out in-kind benefits like food stamps or housing assistance. More relevant to this round of studies of poverty in 2020, the official measure only counts pre-tax income, meaning refundable credits like the child tax credit and the 2020-2021 stimulus payments (which were technically structured as tax credits) don’t count for poverty purposes.

The upshot? The official poverty measure shouldn’t move at all in response to the stimulus checks, or the strengthened child tax credit, or increased food stamp benefits. Even though all those measures make life materially easier for people in poverty, the official measure ignores them. It’s just another way in which the official measure is outdated, and highlights how limited this picture of poverty in America is.

That’s why these new studies are so important. Combined, they really start to give us an accurate picture of poverty in the current stimulus era.

What the new poverty studies say

Because the methods used in each study are so different, it’s striking that they reached a very similar conclusion: Poverty in 2021 will be much lower than it was in 2018, and it will be lower largely because of anti-poverty programs.

The Columbia researchers estimated that the December 2020 relief bill (which reintroduced supplemental unemployment checks and sent out $600 checks) reduced poverty in 2021 from 13.6 percent to 12.3 percent; the Biden stimulus, including $1,400 checks, additional unemployment support, and the enhanced child tax credit, cut it further to 8.5 percent. Without these interventions, poverty would’ve been higher than in 2018, not lower.

Meanwhile, the Urban Institute team broke down the anti-poverty effects program by program. The stimulus checks alone lifted some 12.4 million people from poverty this year, their research finds. Food stamps, including Covid- related improvements, removed another 7.9 million people from poverty, while unemployment insurance (both the base program and Covid-19 bonuses) lifted another 6.7 million people out.

Another Columbia project, for which Parolin is also the lead researcher, uses a different dataset to attempt to estimate poverty every month during the pandemic. This is a slightly different project than estimating annual poverty; for instance, it implies that for people who got the $1,400 checks in March 2021, the checks reduced poverty that month, but did nothing for poverty in April. But this data still underscores how important Covid-specific policies like those have been for reducing poverty. Without relief measures, poverty rates would be much higher throughout much of the pandemic, as a trend line comparison shows.

At the University of Chicago, Bruce Meyer and other policy researchers have their own monthly poverty measure that works slightly differently. Like the Columbia measure, it uses data from the monthly Current Population Survey — a census study that asks some 60,000 households every month about their income and other life conditions — to estimate the current poverty rate. It uses the official poverty measure threshold for income, but it includes sources of income the official measure excludes, in particular tax credits like the stimulus checks.

Their measure showed poverty falling substantially with the first round of stimulus checks in 2020. In February 2020, the last pre-pandemic month, poverty was 10.7 percent per their measure; in May, it bottomed out at 9.1 percent. But they then saw poverty steadily increase for the rest of the year, even continuing after the Biden stimulus, with June’s rate estimated at 11 percent, higher than before the pandemic.

That’s a striking finding, especially when you consider that the Columbia researchers also saw poverty increase in April and May after falling when stimulus checks began to go out in March. But the data from Meyer and his colleagues doesn’t account for some sources of financial support, like food stamps, which might partially explain why it finds higher poverty than other sources.

What the fall in poverty tells us

Poverty measurement is incredibly tricky, as the nuances above hopefully make clear. But the basic math of measuring poverty is rather simple. First, you pick a dollar amount. Then you find out how many people’s incomes fall below that dollar amount. Choosing what amount to use, and how to define income, is hard, but the basic concept requires nothing more than arithmetic.

This also implies that reducing poverty is pretty simple: Just put more money in people’s hands. That won’t necessarily be enough if, like the official poverty measure, your metric entirely ignores money the government gives out through tax credits. But by any normal poverty measure, handing out cash should reduce poverty.

This past year was a huge vindication of that insight. Years of research had suggested that cash programs don’t necessarily have the big downside their critics always highlight: discouraging work. If handing out cash led people to work dramatically fewer hours or to quit their jobs, then cash payments wouldn’t cut poverty by as much as they initially seem to.

Luckily, cash doesn’t seem to discourage work to that degree. In 2019, a group of economists and sociologists specializing in child poverty put together a major report for the National Academy of Sciences, and their estimate based on the research literature was that a cash benefit of $3,000 per year for all but the richest children would reduce work effort by about 1.15 hours a week on average — a fairly trivial amount that barely changes the antipoverty impact of such a program.

The effects of stimulus checks to adults, like those pursued in the past year, are surely different, but the evidence generally suggests that work disincentive effects of cash are small. University of Pennsylvania economist Ioana Marinescu, in a wide-ranging review of the effects of cash programs, concluded, “Our fear that people will quit their jobs en masse if provided with cash for free is false and misguided.”

All of which suggests that using cash to reduce poverty might really just be an arithmetic problem: give people enough money to escape poverty and they’ll escape poverty.

The US has been sending out a lot of cash during the pandemic. But that’s almost certainly coming to an end. The enhanced child tax credit is a policy many Democrats want to make permanent, or at least (as the Biden administration has proposed) extend for several more years. But the $1,200 and $600 and $1,400 stimulus checks were emergency measures, as were the $300/$600 weekly unemployment supplements.

All that implies that in 2022, when those measures are gone, poverty is likely to shoot back up again, even in a strong economy with robust job growth.

Erin Clark/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
In Chelsea, Massachusetts, coronavirus cases continue to be steady, food lines remain long, and rental relief is desperately needed.

That doesn’t have to be the case. A permanent poverty reduction agenda could make sure we don’t only fight poverty in extreme conditions like pandemics.

The US could, for instance, boost unemployment benefits on a permanent basis, and implement triggers to increase benefits during downturns. Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden is working on a plan for this currently, and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) has a detailed outline of proposals along these lines as well.

We could also adopt a guaranteed income for adults to approximate the effect of the stimulus checks, as a permanent policy. Just as one example, a team at Ohio State’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, led by Naomi Zewde, have developed a proposal for a guaranteed income set at the national poverty line (currently $12,500) for adults, with $4,500 per year per child in extra benefits for families with kids.

Another, more modest, option would be to turn the standard deduction into a refundable tax credit. A single person could get monthly checks totaling, say, $2,761 per year — the same benefit someone in the 22 percent tax bracket gets from the standard deduction right now. That would make doing taxes simpler while reducing poverty.

But the broader point is not that we need any specific guaranteed income plan. The point is that poverty is a policy choice. The federal government can literally make the poverty rate whatever it likes. It could continue reducing poverty year after year, even after Covid-19 is over. It just needs to make that choice.

Shein has collaborated with well-known musicians (Katy Perry, Nick Jonas, Lil Nas X, Tinashe) for concerts and events and, like its trendy competitors, has sponsored influencers (Addison Rae) and created capsule collections with D-list reality TV stars (The Bachelor’s Hannah Godwin, The Only Way Is Essex’s Amber Turner). But Shein isn’t a brand made for and peddled by the rich and famous. In fact, it has cemented its reputation among regular people, particularly Gen Z shoppers, who promote the brand through unsponsored clothing hauls and outfit posts on social media. Friends and coworkers have recommended Shein swimwear and dresses to me in casual conversation, over text and even on Slack. On TikTok, a recent crowd favorite is Shein’s cross-wrap crop top — a $13 garment that resembles a halter top, but with a strategically placed cutout that reveals extra cleavage.

There are tens of thousands of styles on the retailer’s site, and each day, about 1,000 more are added. For context, this production pace is even speedier than the “ultra-fast” sites that dominate fast fashion’s Instagram era; Missguided and Fashion Nova, for example, reportedly release about 1,000 new styles a week. Shein’s business model, like that of its fast forebears, abides by the tenet that more is better, that excess can be made accessible through mysteriously low prices, with little care for environmental costs or transparency about its labor force.

@mynamesmillicent69

The part two no one asked for <3 #foryoupage #fyp #foryou #shein #sheinhaul

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A skilled Shein shopper can theoretically buy an entire outfit, accessories and shoes included, for $30 or less. In fact, there are entire sections on the site that help customers clinch the cheapest deals: A shopper can browse for tops under $5.99, dresses under $9.99, and clearance items under $5. The wardrobe possibilities, it seems, are endless. One Twitter user recently observed that $280 spent on Shein can create a year’s worth of outfits.

Yet Shein’s emergence as a fast fashion juggernaut can’t solely be attributed to the price of its clothing or its ubiquitous internet presence. The retailer is also nowhere to be found in the physical world — at least not in brick-and-mortar stores, although it has previously hosted in-person pop-up events. Shein appeared to have sprung out of thin air into the mainstream, unlike fast fashion’s old guards, whose spacious, brightly lit stores were proof of their dominance. Yet, Shein is so far ahead of competitors like H&M, Zara, and Asos, according to an analysis by Apptopia, that it’s difficult to compare them.

So what makes Shein so special? The answer might seem simple (two words: supply chains), if not for its influence over ever-changing trends and its impact on fashion consumption. There’s no doubt that it’s Shein’s world, and we’re just shopping in it.

A brief, incomplete history of Shein

Shein was first launched in 2008 under the domain SheInside, as a site that sold wedding dresses and women’s fashion geared toward US and English-language shoppers. The retailer was started in Nanjing, a province in China, by entrepreneur Chris Xu, who specialized in search engine optimization marketing. Xu has yet to publicly express any interest in women’s fashion or clothing design (granted, it doesn’t seem like he has done many interviews in English); his expertise lies in SEO and brand marketing, key factors that have contributed to Shein’s online popularity.

During Shein’s early years, there was very little that distinguished the brand from other Chinese e-commerce retailers, except that it sold wedding gowns. According to reporting from PandaYoo, an English-language site published by Chinese bloggers, Shein sourced its products from China’s wholesale clothing market in Guangzhou, a region where many Chinese garment factories and markets are centralized. Shein wasn’t involved in any aspect of garment design or manufacturing. It operated much like a dropshipping business that sells products from third-party wholesalers directly to overseas shoppers.

It wasn’t until 2014 that Shein began to acquire its own supply chain system, transforming itself into a fully integrated retailer. That year, it purchased Romwe, another Chinese e-commerce retailer. By 2015, the company had shortened its domain name to Shein, a move that reportedly made the brand more memorable and searchable for shoppers. Yet, prior to these major changes in 2014, the company had a decent online presence and enough customers to expand its operations. It was an early adopter of social media marketing, partnering with fashion bloggers for giveaways and promoting products on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest as far back as 2012.

#SheInside Valentine’s Day Giveaway
Follow @sheinsider,reply and retweet the tweet.
5 winners! pic.twitter.com/jmcbxoPqu3

— SHEIN (@SHEIN_official) January 28, 2014

Throughout the early 2010s, Shein launched overseas sites in Spain, France, Russia, Italy, and Germany, and began selling cosmetics, shoes, bags, and jewelry, in addition to womenswear. According to a translated article from the Chinese tech site LatePost, by 2016, Xu had assembled a team of 800 designers and prototypers, dedicated to rapidly producing Shein-branded clothes. Shein also began honing its supply chain, cutting out suppliers that produced “mediocre-quality products or images,” according to a 2016 press release.

By 2017, the present-day iteration of Shein had begun to take shape. The brand advertised on daytime television shows in the US, and fashion influencers showcased Shein products and hauls alongside other retailers, like Fashion Nova and Zaful. It was, however, the retailer’s early use of TikTok and ability to market viral products that skyrocketed Shein’s popularity.

Is Shein simply “fast fashion,” or is it the future?

While venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs tout Shein as the future of fashion, the company’s rise didn’t occur in a vacuum. Its success is predicated on a confluence of factors, from geopolitical trade policies to a decades-old, disaggregated global fashion ecosystem.

The fast fashion business model was pioneered in the 1990s by the founder of Inditex, the parent company of Spanish retailer Zara. Zara notoriously abandoned the concept of fashion seasons for a year-long cycle of production, which introduced customers to novel items every few weeks. Its success prompted other Western designers and retailers — H&M and Forever 21, to name two — to follow its lead into the next decade. Retailers migrated most of their manufacturing process overseas to countries with lax labor laws, where wages can be low and working overtime (without additional pay) is common. This, of course, made fashion companies more profitable, as shoppers became hooked on a cycle of novelty. But soon, things were about to get even faster.

Toward the tail end of the 2010s, “ultra-fast” fashion brands — Asos, Boohoo, Fashion Nova, and now Shein — emerged as viable competitors to the dominant fashion empires of the previous decade. Last October, Reuters reported that investors think “Zara … is going to be crushed by fast fashion 2.0.” These ultra-fast fashion companies are able to reach millions of young shoppers directly through social media without the need for physical retail space, and relied on search traffic and customer data to foreshadow trends.

But by virtue of Shein’s location and software technology, the retailer developed a speedy edge on its competitors. Matthew Brennan, a Beijing-based writer and analyst of Chinese technology, likened its pace to “real-time” retail. That means Shein is constantly gathering and analyzing customer data and uses that knowledge to craft new designs — within as little as three days.

“Each new design is basically a bet because Shein can estimate how well a product is going to do, but it doesn’t know for sure until it sells,” Brennan explained. “Compared to its fast fashion competitors, Shein is able to take more bets, but at a lower risk. It’s able to place very small initial orders with these factories, about 100 or even smaller.” These batches were much smaller than Zara’s and that of ultra-fast fashion retailers like Boohoo, which reportedly ordered about 300 to 500 units per style. If a specific top goes viral overnight on TikTok, for example, Shein will be able to instantaneously ramp up production on the garment and place additional orders depending on demand.

Shein has spent years cultivating relationships with Chinese garment factories and manufacturers, whereas most Western brands generally outsource this work. Inditex is similarly situated close to a garment production center in the northeast region of Spain, but according to Brennan, business in China moves much faster.

“Shein doesn’t work with very large factories but [with] small to mid-sized workshops that pick up orders daily,” Brennan said. “It’s very much like an Uber system, where new orders are coming into factory owners’ phones and they receive the order. It’s very scrappy, but efficient.”

Most retailers place a main order at the start of the season, according to Craig Ryder, director of the UK-based Supply Chain Consulting Group: “It depends on where the order is made and where it’s being shipped to, but generally, between a retailer placing an order and getting it to market, there is very limited time to order more.”

And despite Shein’s popularity, the company remains largely unknown among Chinese consumers. The Chinese apparel market is extremely competitive, and Shein’s priority from the beginning has been to export goods abroad. The retailer has also benefited from deteriorating trade relations between China and the US. China began waiving export taxes for direct-to-consumer companies in 2018 after the US imposed more tariffs, Bloomberg reported. Since Shein ships its orders directly to customers from Chinese warehouses, packages worth less than $800, or small-value shipments, generally remain duty-free. In other words, Shein has managed to circumvent paying both export and import taxes for about three years, something brick-and-mortar retailers aren’t able to avoid.

“If you’re Zara, there’s no way you’re going to get around US import duties because you’re not shipping to individuals. You’re selling to stores and importing in bulk,” Michael Horowitz, a consultant at the firm Retail ROI, told Bloomberg. “[Zara has] too much of a physical presence. It can’t get away with it.”

Still, receiving a shipment from Shein can take a week or longer, which is a prolonged timeline for most US-based retailers and, of course, Amazon. (The company does offer free shipping on all orders.) Shein has, in a sense, served as an accelerant in the fashion world. It has forced competitors to reassess the emphasis on speed to increase profit margins, at the cost of everything else.

Is Shein’s speediness ethical?

Over the past year, Shein has received backlash from customers for selling, among several offensive items, a necklace with a Buddhist swastika pendant, a phone case with an image of a handcuffed Black person outlined in chalk, and a Muslim prayer mat as a decorative rug. The company has apologized for these incidents, which Shein has spun as a lack of cultural sensitivity and understanding of its global audiences.

But these hiccups — which are offensive at worst, and weird at best — are partly a direct result of Shein’s fast production cycle. Following the completely legal copycat model of most fast fashion retailers, Shein employs workers to recreate trending designs for its own products. The artwork on Shein’s offensive phone case was replicated without permission from a 2014 drawing by French graphic artist Jean Jullien, in the wake of the Ferguson uprisings. Several designers and artists have accused the company of making blatant rip-offs of their work, but there’s little that can be done, besides drawing the internet’s attention to it.

Im SO over these major brands stealing from black designers. @SHEIN_official STOLE my @sincerelyriaxo designs to a T. They couldn’t even change ONE thing and it’s now one of their highest selling items. They even stole the brands aesthetic. Like Come on pic.twitter.com/ose8DiM9hK

— Mariama Diallo ✨ (@MariamaDiallo__) June 11, 2021

There’s a running, unproven accusation on TikTok that Shein depends on child labor. These comments usually appear on videos of Shein hauls or styling videos, in which users try to shame well-off creators for buying from a purportedly unethical company. To be clear, there is no evidence that Shein employs children or produces an unsafe labor environment, but the company has not publicly disclosed workers’ wages or hours. In August, Reuters reported that Shein has yet to disclose information about its working conditions and supply chain to the British government, which the retailer is required to do under UK law. Shein had also previously falsely stated on its website that its factories were certified by international labor standard bodies, according to Reuters.

In China, however, LatePost reported that Shein has developed “a reputation for timely payment [to factories],” which is a rarity in the country. The retailer also appears to have a good rapport with the factory owners it employs, who were willing to relocate their operations alongside Shein in 2015.

Yet much remains unknown about Shein’s business practices, and timely payment alone should not be cause for praise or relief from consumers. What are the ethics of producing and selling thousands of garments a day at a breakneck pace, even if workers are reportedly paid on time? Shein’s business model drives — and depends on — overconsumption. Some of the most popular Shein-related TikToks feature young women buying hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothes to try on for every season or fashion TikTok trend. Sure, not every consumer can afford ethically made goods or have easy access to a thrift store, but it’s not low-income shoppers who are keeping Shein and the fast fashion industry alive.

@itsdejbabes

It finally came…$800 spent on clothes ✨…. SHEIN haul ?#fyp #foryou #foryourpage #shein_official #sheinhaul #fashion #shein

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I’ve previously written about how the fashion industry is one of the world’s most resource-intensive sectors, even though there is no official research that fully summarizes fashion’s environmental impact. The production of polyester textiles alone emitted about 706 billion kilograms of greenhouse gases in 2015, and hundreds of gallons of water go into making a single cotton garment. Most of the clothes from Shein are made from synthetic fabrics, which are responsible for releasing plastic microfibers into oceans.

The retailer has stayed mum on ethical fashion and sustainability, but it’s hard to imagine Shein embracing corporate accountability without widespread consumer pressure. Regardless, Shein seems poised to be the fashion giant of the decade, and investors are scrambling to look for other retailers that could copy its speedy supply chain. And as the fashion industry adjusts to Shein’s blinding pace, it’s safe to assume that shoppers are encouraged and expected to buy more and more. All it takes is another viral must-have product from a brand that might be the next big thing. For now, though, Shein doesn’t seem willing to give up the throne.

Update, 8/10: Updated to include new information from Reuters about Shein failing to disclose its working standards to the UK government, and false claims the company made on its website about its factories’ certifications.

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