I'm shopping at Abercrombie for
the first time since I was in high school. Mildly triggering because this was like
the coolest store back in the day. But I could never afford it
because my family is middle class. Now that I'm here, I'm noticing
two main things. One is that
everything is kind of affordable, which was definitely not the case
in high school. The other thing that I'm noticing is that everything is just a little bit shittier
than you'd want it to be. Seeing a lot of like
loose threads on things and a lot of stuff that's just made out of 100% synthetic
fabrics. Clothing just doesn't feel like this
nice, firm, high quality
that I associate with Abercrombie. Abercrombie still does
sell some high quality clothing. I actually I really like this dress
and would totally buy it. And I'm glad they've decided to start
using normal lighting in their stores. But seeing so much cheap
and low quality stuff there made me wonder, did clothing used to be better
when I was a teenager? Not just at Abercrombie,
but across the board. So I scoured eBay, Depop and Poshmark for clothes from trusted brands
of the '90's and 2000's. Then I went to those same stores
and bought the 2024 version of each item. Abercrombie was like legendary
for really high quality denim. To compare the old and new, I got help from Amanda McCarty. I worked as a buyer in the fashion
industry for about 20 years. In the span of my career, I saw how what we sell people changed. The two major changes, I would say
are, one, nothing fits properly anymore. It's not you. It's
nothing about your body. You're great. And two, the longevity of these clothes,
even how you feel when you put them
on, has degraded so much. It's just not a good deal. It's not just in my head. It has gotten harder
to find quality clothes that last, even at brands you used to like. If you're wondering why, keep watching, I want you to think about how many new pieces of clothing
you bought last year. If you're anything like
the average American, it was around 68. in 1980 that number was 12. But wait, it gets crazier. In the '80s, Americans spent about 7%
of their annual income on clothes. Today, it's just 3%. We spend half as much, even though
we're buying five times more. This Abercrombie ad from the '80s
helps explain why. The high quality wool
was a huge selling point. They even tell you exactly
where it's from. And notice how they say
this is part of their fall collection? Because in the '80s
and '90s, stores only had new clothes a couple of times a year. Usually a spring summer collection
and a fall winter collection. And designers would start working
on each collection up to nine months in advance because clothing production
takes a lot of work. They had to think of hundreds of unique
designs and whittle them down to the dozen or so best ones, send the designs to the factory,
go back and forth with them for months to create a prototype,
choose the best fabric, the right embellishments, and figure
out the proportions for different sizes. After all that, they place a massive order with the factory
and then just pray the design would sell. It was kind of like a game of chance. You'd place two huge bets per year,
and if your styles flopped, you'd be stuck
with a whole bunch of clothes you'd have to sell or discount
or just throw away. That risk is why so much care and thoughtfulness
went into making each piece of clothing and why you could expect quality
at every price point. Even at discount stores like Sears or J.C. Penney. Just look at the way J.C. Penney advertised this suit
in an ad from the '80s. Two piece suits
that are expertly tailored, classically designed
and have an elegant touch. They're not selling you on the price or the trendiness,
but on the craftsmanship and design. Even one of the cheaper suits on
the market was still pretty high quality, which is probably why
if you adjust for inflation, this $160 suit would cost $600 today. If you go to J.C. Penney now, you can easily
get a two piece suit for under $200. So in the '80s and '90s,
people were buying fewer clothes, but they'd be well-made pieces
that would be worn for years. And keeping up with all the trends? Well, that was something
only wealthy people could do. Pull the latest Brioni's
and charge them to our account. Yes, ma'am. What are Brioni's?
Six months of my car payments, plus a car. Then came a little store called Zara
and everything began to change. The New York Times
coined the term fast fashion in this 1989 article
about the first U.S. store of Zara. "The latest trend is what we're after," A Zara executive told The Times. "It takes 15 days between a new idea
and getting it into the stores." Remember that took most stores
nine months. How did Zara do it in 15 days? By streamlining
this part of the production process with something called griege goods rather than manufacturing overseas. Zara built their own
high tech factories in Spain, all connected to headquarters
by an underground monorail. There, robots working around the clock
cut and dye fabrics to create unfinished, uncovered pieces
that can be turned into any garment. Once the design is created,
Zara can send those greige goods to their network of small shops
in nearby regions where they're transformed
into finished dresses, trousers and tops. Instead of huge orders, Zara makes
a small batch of each style to start with. The retail stores
can then send feedback to headquarters about what's selling and what's not,
and they can quickly ramp up production on whatever's
popular, restocking within days if needed. It massively reduced the risk
that came with clothing production. Instead of losing money on clearance sales
or throwing away unsold goods,
Zara's styles often sell out quickly. The designers don't have to predict
trends a year in advance. They can just respond to fashion trends as they emerge, though
sometimes that gets a little sketchy. For example, here's a look
from the high fashion designer, Celine, from a collection
that debuted on the Vogue runway in 2013. This skirt would have retailed
for at least $1,000. And here's a very similar looking skirt selling on Zara's website for just $80. According to the Wayback Machine,
Zara had this skirt for sale by August, which would have been
just a few weeks after Celine's version landed in boutiques. These runway knockoffs
and how quickly Zara could get them into stores were wildly popular. By August 2008, Zara's
parent company, Inditex, became the world's
largest fashion retailer. This is also when you had the rise
of two other fast fashion giants of the new millennium,
Forever 21 and H&M, which pioneered a new way
to bring the runway to the masses. They partner with luxury designers
to make exclusive lines for H&M at affordable prices,
starting with Karl Lagerfeld in 2004. "Karl is it true?" "Of course, it's true."
This part of the story, it seems sort of like a win for the 99%. Fast fashion was making it
so that anyone could wear runway designs while they were still popular. That was a new thing.
Of course, encouraging lots of consumers to buy low cost clothes
that would go out of style quickly would shockingly
have some downsides, too. But we'll come back to that. Bcause we can't give the minds
behind Zara and H&M all the credit
for the rise of fast fashion. We also have to give some credit
to ... Bill Clinton? No, not because of his style. In 1994, President Clinton signed NAFTA,
the North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it cheaper
to make clothes in Mexico. And a few years later,
he normalized trade relations with China. Textile factories
started moving out of the U.S. because now clothing retailers had access to the largest pool of cheap
labor in human history. Luckily, there was a law from
the '70s, The Multifiber Arrangement, which limited how much clothing
American and European countries could import from other nations. Unfortunately,
the World Trade Organization let it expire in 2005,
ushering the heyday of fast fashion, because now there was nothing
stopping companies from producing everything in the countries
with the lowest wages, the fewest labor laws
and the laxest environmental regulations. We've arrived at the fashion landscape
that I remember from my teens. In the 2000s, you had four distinct buying options
ranging in price and quality: high fashion or luxury brands, department stores, mall brands
and fast fashion. But these days,
it kind of feels like the bottom of this pyramid has collapsed and everything's
a little cheaper and shittier. J.Crew, Anthropologie. Abercrombie These didn't used to be considered fast fashion,
but now they arguably are. And that's because of two very big things that changed the experience
of shopping into the hellscape of today. The first is the 2008 financial crisis. Middle class consumers
no longer had as much money to spend, so they began drifting over
to cheaper options, while all of the other non fast
fashion retailers were struggling. Forever 21 was opening store after store
after store. H&M, the same thing. Zara is spreading into other cities. And so the conversation began,
"How do we compete here?" "What if we continue
to show the same prices on the price tags that we always have? But we know that we're going to sell
most of the units of that style on sale,
and we plan for that?" So let's say this dress costs $40 to make and it retailed for $100 in 2007. In 2010, during the recession,
the retailer would keep the price tag at $100, but expect that most pieces
will only sell once it goes on sale. So they'll only spend, let's say, $15
to make it so they'll still make a profit. And how do you make clothes for cheap? Well, by making cheaper clothes,
you add synthetic materials like polyester instead of selling pure
natural fibers like cotton and wool. You skimp on details like pockets,
buttons and zippers and offer less sizes. I could see all these things
play out in the clothing I bought, like these men's jeans from Abercrombie,
from the 2000s versus now. The vintage pair weighs
a hefty 761 grams and is 100% cotton. They feel substantial, long lasting,
really high quality denim. They have a decent amount
of distressing on here that was probably done by hand to sort of
break down areas, make them softer. In the fast fashion era, a lot of this is skipped where it's just like,
let's just spray them with acid or do other things that are like actually,
like very toxic. The new pair weighs less at 720 grams
and is a cotton elastane blend. This is that fast fashion track of okay,
if we add a little bit of stretch, it will fit more people theoretically
and they'll be less likely to return them. But putting elastane in jeans shortens
the lifespan pretty significantly. Those elastane fibers that are woven
in here, they're plastic and they break. And the more you wash them,
the sooner they break. But you get into the cycle where
you have to wash the jeans more often to get them to go back to size
because they get stretched out. The other main difference
between these jeans, the zippers. We have a legit luxurious zipper,
long lasting 100% metal. They smoothly go up and down
like these are things that you take for granted until you get a bad zipper. The new pair,
when you were trying to unzip these, that sound, you can feel like this
zipper is going to be a problem soon. This is a difference of maybe $0.50,
but it's a penny's game to get the pricing
to work with the targets you're given. Another area that you can really see
how quality degraded is with sweaters. We compared an Anthropologie sweater
from today to a vintage sweater made in the nineties. This sweater is Liz Claiborne, which is
like Anthropologie before Anthropologie. The vintage sweater is 100% wool. The one made today is 100% polyester. The vintage sweater has metal buttons. The other one has no buttons at all. The vintage sweater is a size medium. The one made today is one size. When I see "one size" in something like,
oh, it's because they couldn't afford to buy it in sizes
to meet the margin targets. Even with all these cost cutting measures,
traditional retailers were struggling. And that's around the time private
equity firms started buying them up, saddling them with debt
and letting all the business decisions be made by finance bros, whose idea of fashion is that Patagonia vest over a gingham shirt. And on top of all that, there's still that
other huge change that I mentioned. The final death knell in quality clothing,
the Internet. Social media and fast
fashion are a match made in heaven. Social media helped shorten our attention
spans, which extends to fashion trends too,
which cycled through faster and faster. That makes fast
fashion indispensable to influencers who rely on a steady stream of new clothes
for their content. This puts pressure on all of us
to wear a totally unique, never before seen outfit every single day,
which is pretty hard. Lizzie McGuire.
you are an outfit repeater. I guess now it's time to talk about
Shein, Zara's more chaotic little sister, the logical conclusion of fast fashion. Shein is a company that focuses on selling
as much hyper trendy, super low quality clothing. They can for mind blowingly cheap prices. Shein raked in close to $10 billion
in 2020. It's currently the biggest clothing retailer in the world,
even beating out Amazon in the U.S. Shein is not just fast
fashion, it's instant fashion. Zara can get products
from drawing board to store in 15 days. Shein can do it in three. Zara can release
35,000 new items of clothes per year. Shein will release that many in
just a couple weeks. So how do they do it? Rather than functioning as a cohesive
clothing manufacturer with its own factories like Zara, Shein
is more like Amazon, a huge marketplace selling clothes from thousands
of independent Chinese factories. And it treats those factories
sort of like Uber treats its drivers. The factories are hooked up to Shein's
software that collects real time feedback about which items are selling
well and which aren't. The software then sends alerts to the factory owners
phones to ramp up or slow down production. It's Zara's
small batch production on steroids. And just like other billionaires,
Shein finds creative ways to avoid U.S. taxes. See, when you buy something from Shein,
your clothes are shipped to you directly from the factory in China. There's
no big Amazon style warehouses in the U.S. full of Shein dresses. And since packages valued at under $800
can enter the U.S. duty free Shein merchandise is pretty much
always exempt from consumer goods tariffs. That exemption, it's called de
minimis, was originally created so you could buy a rug or a lamp
while you're on vacation and ship it back to yourself
without having to pay tariffs, not for big clothing retailers. 50 years of fast fashion and ultra fast fashion has completely changed
our relationship with clothes. Instead of being something
to cherish and care for, they're now just another cheap and disposable
plastic consumer good. Thanks to fast fashion, clothing retailer is in a
race to the bottom death spiral. Everything is fast fashion now. And the thing is, all this overproduction,
it doesn't just affect clothing quality. When private equity and fast
fashion companies greedily maximize their profits,
no matter what the cost, that hurts workers
across the entire textile supply chain. Now, mass
producing clothing has always relied on extremely exploitative labor
and dangerous working conditions. But as the industry gets bigger,
the casualties and abuses do keep growing. Like when a garment factory
collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013, killing over a thousand workers. But the fast fashion companies that produce clothes,
they're hardly faced any accountability. So it's no surprise that nearly ten years
later, a 2021 investigation by Public Eye,
a Swiss human rights group showed that factories
that supply Shein are crowded and unsafe with blocked emergency exits and people
regularly working over 75 hours a week. Slavery is still an issue, too. According to recent investigations,
anywhere between 20 and 30% of clothes
being sold in the U.S. contain cotton from Xinjiang,
a region in China with cotton farms that rely on forced labor from weavers
and other Muslim minorities. The prices
that we are offered on these clothes that are the prices we're willing to pay
are not based in a reality where everybody involved is paid a living
wage and works under good conditions. I mean, they're built off
of cutting corners and exploitation. Now, I want you to once again think of all
those new clothes you bought last year. How many of them will you still be wearing
next year... the year after? The average American
gets rid of 81 pounds of clothes per year. And that's nothing compared
to the hundreds of billions of pounds of unsold clothing and returns that
manufacturers and retailers throw away. No one actually knows
how much exactly it is, but we do know that you can see
the world's textile waste from space. This mountain of discarded clothes
in Chile's Atacama Desert grows by 39,000 tons per year. The polyester
that's in almost all clothing these days will take centuries to decompose. None of this bad PR is slowing down
textile production at all. Shein is on the verge of an IPO
on the London Stock Exchange with a $64 billion valuation. That kind of stuff makes the fast
fashion industry seem unstoppable. But there are people fighting back. First,
there's that de minimis tax exemption we talked about that allowed
Shein to evade tariffs. A bipartisan group of lawmakers
are trying to close that loophole. Meanwhile, New York lawmakers have introduced legislation
to create for the first time legally binding environmental
and labor standards for the industry. And dozens of brands
have been investigated for using cotton from Xinjiang, including H&M, Nike,
Uniqlo, Burberry and Shein. But there's still a lot to be done, and the industry is going to fight
every step of the way. Remember
when I said Shein's IPO is in London? The reason
they're not doing it in New York is because they didn't want to comply
with U.S. regulations that would force them
to make disclosures about forced labor in their supply chain.
They haven't given up, though. They're lawyering up
and lobbying against those regulations. Fast fashion is the story of unchecked
corporate greed in a bargain for lower prices for. well, you. Though, as we've shown, that
hasn't actually worked out for consumers. We need lawmakers to continue
cracking down on corporations like Shein because we all deserve clothes
that look and feel good but don't require exploiting workers and destroying the
planet just to be affordable.
