Fast Fashion Casino

47 points by anupamchugh 1 year ago | 56 comments
  • jawns 1 year ago
    Temu, in particular, operates very much like a gambling app, with the clothing and other products dangled as prizes. Yes, you can purchase them directly -- but there are ample avenues through which you are tempted to get them for even more steeply discounted prices by completing various challenges, promotions, and games.

    The app steers users heavily toward its in-app games that use tactics grabbed straight from slot machines to keep users enticed.

    I was directed toward its Fishland game, which allows you to select five products, each valued between $10-$20, to get for free if you complete the game. And initially, the game is easy and credits are free-flowing. You're told you're 50% of the way there within the first few minutes of playing. But as you get closer and closer to 100%, progress becomes glacial, and you're directed to make more purchases and share referral codes to earn more credits. I'm told that to get from 99.99% to 100%, you need 100,000 credits.

    • harimau777 1 year ago
      I sew clothing as a hobby and have a friend who does so as their job. One of the most difficult things that my friend deals with is people having no idea what a hand sewn (in this case by "hand sewn" I mean not industrially manufactured, not sewing using needle and thread) garment costs to make.

      Just the materials generally cost more than a fast fashion garment and even relatively simple garments like a basic shirt take hours to sew. Even at if the labor is priced at minimum wage, something like a jacket or dress could cost hundreds of dollars.

      • hn_throwaway_99 1 year ago
        Yeah, the ultra low prices of fast fashion have also helped to wreck the thrift store model.

        The thrift store I volunteer at has standard prices for most garments: $5 for a T-shirt, $6 for a pair of pants, $8 for a dress, etc. (though very high-end designer items are individually priced in a "boutique" section). While those prices are a great deal for most "mall-based" secondhand items, they're often higher than the new price for Temu/Shein clothes. Volunteers have just been told to throw any donations of those brands away, because it's not even worth it to sort and inventory them. But still items sneak through, so you'll see loads of people online bitching about how "They're crazy if they think I'm going to buy this Shein skirt for $xyz."

        Fast fashion is a plague on humanity. So much garbage, and for what, a 5 second dopamine hit after someone taps a buy button?

        • tnecniv 1 year ago
          It goes that way with furniture too. I wanted to make a super basic thing that doubled as a raiser for my TV and space to store a few books. Basically 3 pieces of wood. The cost of the wood was as much as some mass produced junk you can get on Amazon from a knock off factory in Asia.
          • ActionHank 1 year ago
            Out of interest what are the benefits of a hand sewn garment vs something that is tailored, but using machines?

            Edit: not sure why I am being downvoted, genuinely curious if there is a material difference or if it is just the more ethical thing to support.

            • harimau777 1 year ago
              I think I chose my terminology poorly. I was avoiding the term "tailored" because to me that could imply something custom made (e.g. taking someone's measurements and then making a suit or dress pattern specifically to fit them) whereas I mean something made individually but using an off the shelf pattern.

              However, to your question: To me I don't see a lot of advantage in hand sewing for most applications. However, that's not the area of sewing that I specialize in, so someone who was really into it would likely have a different opinion! That being said, I can think of some specialized situations where hand sewing would be necessary or have an advantage, and I'm sure there are others that I don't know about:

              There are certain specialized hand stitches that can produce unique effects. For example, blind stitches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_stitch) can be used to join fabric without a visible stitch thread.

              Smocking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smocking) is a specialized hand sewing technique for creating ruffles or gathers in fabric; either to make them form fitting (without using elastic or knit fabrics) or for decoration. A lot of the characters in House of the Dragon wear clothing with gathers in them that sort of look like scales; that's smocking.

              Certain things like sewing on sequins can be done with a machine but it's a machine that most people don't own. My favorite example of this is sashiko (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sashiko). Sashiko is a beautiful Japanese style of embroidery originally developed to reenforce fabrics. However, it is generally done using a running stitch (the basic up and down stitch with a needle such that there are visible gaps between each stitch) which most sewing machines can't do.

              The most obvious application is historical reenactment. That could be done either to achieve a period appropriate effect (for example one of the techniques I described above) or just to maintain authenticity.

            • droopyEyelids 1 year ago
              GP put a parenthetical in their post that indicates they mean tailored (the way you're using it)
          • tristor 1 year ago
            The thing about fast fashion that upsets me the most is that it’s driving the market. It’s very very difficult to find high quality clothing that is ethically made, because so much of the market and money have gone to fast fashion. Teemu and Shein may be the new thing, but H&M, Mango, Gap, etc have been around forever.

            I had to spend 4 months doing research on textiles and enlisting help to scour the internet/world before I could find a properly made pea coat last year, as an example. Sure there’s some sort of pea coat available from every major fashion brand, but they’re made for looks not function and durability, whereas a proper coat will keep you warm walking the dog in driving snow where I live in the Colorado mountains.

            I have had a hell of a time buying shirts and dressier pants that hold up, but I think finally arrived at good options.

            If it was simply a matter of paying more to get better stuff, I wouldn’t be so bothered, but that’s really not how it works. You can’t even rely on the same brand and product to maintain quality due to market pressures from fast fashion, and I am not quite well to do enough to have everything made bespoke, so it’s a relentless grind to buy non-shitty clothes in 2023, of similar quality to most higher end mall brands in 1995. In a lot of ways, I see this as another expression of shrinkflation and the failure of American and European industry.

            • reisse 1 year ago
              I don't buy the rant about fast fashion. For once, the market worked as expected, competition driven the prices down, and now people can buy months worth of wardrobe for a price of a single LVMH item. Clothing is now cheap beyond commodity, and suddenly a crop of journalists start to lament how it is unacceptable. Should be looking for my tinfoil hat probably.
              • ryukoposting 1 year ago
                Speaking as someone whose fiancee buys most of her clothes from Shein, here's what actually happens: She spends $200 on a huge load of clothing, then returns 70% of it because it either fits poorly (Shein's sizing is, as far as I can tell, completely random), looks nothing like the images on the website, or the garment is made of such awful materials that it looks terrible.

                So, what you have is enormous quantities of clothing, most of which nobody wants, manufactured using slave labor and coal power, getting shipped back and forth across continents twice as many times as they would have if you had just bought from a better store.

                Don't get me wrong, she's found some gems on Shein at remarkably low prices, but the majority of what she gets from Shein was destined for a landfill the moment it left the factory.

                • Redster 1 year ago
                  I remember when I first heard the term "pink tax." It seems particularly relevant on clothing. There are a lot of basic essentials (see pockets) that equivalent women's garments simply do not have. And it seems to be more related to the manufacturers than consumers, because it is literally a meme for a girl to be excited about having pockets. And most of the women I know do share info abut which brands have pockets, etc. It seems that women will buy good quality stuff, but I agree that mountains of clothes are being made that don't seem like they were made with any humans in mind that might wear them?

                  That said, I am incredibly grateful to live in a century where clothes are not a very large portion of my budget, yet I still am warm and covered.

                  • Kalium 1 year ago
                    Pockets are one of those niches where expressed and revealed preferences collide in ways that defy memeification.

                    The popular imagination holds the idea that basically any garment can have good, functional, high-quality pockets added to it without consequence. Unfortunately, that's not true. For a common example, you can't just slap good pockets on close-fitting women's jeans. Good pockets need lining and room in the cut to expand. These in turn mean extra cloth. a looser fit, and lots of extra stitching, likely coupled with a higher price. Some of this can be mitigated by using more elastic-heavy material, which comes with a major drop in durability.

                    How many women are looking to pay a higher price for a baggy butt in exchange for pockets? For those that are, the products exist today. Carhartt happily offers such items for $50-$70. Meanwhile, Shein sells their pieces for $10-$15. Bear in mind the Carhartts will almost certainly last longer than four or five Shein pieces.

                    I can think of several very high quality denim brands that do work more fashionable than Carhartt. Of course, they charge more than $50 a pair.

                    In its simplest DIY expression, you can sew a patch pocket on a dress. If you're not very careful in both dress cut and pocket location, the first time you put your phone in your new pocket you will completely wreck the lines of the dress.

                    Of course, when you're paying $15 a piece you don't expect it to last long. So you buy several. This, I suspect, is where a lot of the pink tax in clothing lies.

                    • csdvrx 1 year ago
                      > I remember when I first heard the term "pink tax."

                      It's not that.

                      > There are a lot of basic essentials (see pockets) that equivalent women's garments simply do not have. And it seems to be more related to the manufacturers than consumers, because it is literally a meme for a girl to be excited about having pockets. And most of the women I know do share info abut which brands have pockets, etc. It seems that women will buy good quality stuff, but I agree that mountains of clothes are being made that don't seem like they were made with any humans in mind that might wear them?

                      No, the market works. You are just misunderstanding it, so you might be surprised by my lifehack: when I need pants with pockets, I buy them either from a sport store (most outdoor wear has pockets) or from the men's section (who would've thought about that one lolol)

                      It's just a lifehack, because they are rarely needed for me. And it's not just for me: it's reflected at the market level, so there are fewer options that provide pockets

                      Maybe you like some specific kind of neckties (or something else men wear), or have specific preferences (a man purse to carry your electronics?) so you share info with your friends who have similar preference, but it's not male/female specific.

                    • myaccountonhn 1 year ago
                      What's crazy is also that it's often cheapest to just burn/throw away these clothes that people order and try on and then send back.
                    • marginalia_nu 1 year ago
                      The problem isn't the cost to customers, it's about externalities. Those cheap clothes are subsidized by slave labor and pollution. If you turn a blind eye to that you're complicit.
                      • reisse 1 year ago
                        Most of clothes are subsidized by slave labour or pollution [1] [2]. The question is, who gets the margins. Somehow when it's Shein or Teemu it's "fast fashion bad", and when it's Adidas or Levi's it's "let's close our eyes and pretend that not happened".

                        1. https://fashionchecker.org/

                        2. https://wikirate.org/Clean_Clothes_Campaign+Living_Wages_Pai...

                        • addicted 1 year ago
                          This may be the most ridiculous comment I’ve heard.

                          Nike, Adidas, Levi’s, all sorts of brands have been under attack by people in the West for decades!

                          Western activists have been successfully fighting them to improve their supply chain for at least as long as I have been alive.

                          • jjj123 1 year ago
                            Why do you think we don’t care about US brands? H&M, Nike, Adidas are all built on slave labor and pollution. I didn’t know that Levi’s was as well until reading your comment.

                            I do think the scale and the race to the bottom in terms of price and disposability is slightly worse with these newer companies, though.

                          • addicted 1 year ago
                            It’s not clear that people get more for less in practice so there’s also a question of cost to the consumers.

                            If you buy 10 pieces of clothing for the price of 1, but those cheaper ones last for 1/100th the number of uses the more expensive one does, and the more expensive one can also be repaired to further extend the life, are those 10 pieces actually cheaper?

                            What’s really annoying are comments like the GPs which essentially complain about even doing research on identifying whether there is more to something beyond the surface.

                            It’s such an awful attitude I can’t even understand how people come up with it. Especially since many are the consumers themselves who will benefit from the information being identified. Ive started wondering whether there is a significant (if not majority) of people who are aggressively defensive of their ignorance and prefer it to knowledge.

                            • anewhnaccount2 1 year ago
                              While this is almost definitely the case, in general supply chains are completely opaque to the consumer. Anything you buy could and probably has involved exploitative labor practices in some place. As for pollution, everything uses energy. Even using if something uses green energy in its production, it will cause someone else who otherwise would have used that green energy to use some polluting energy instead. There is no standardized labeling scheme and nobody can be trusted. I mean if the person selling stuff is telling me it's "ethical" -- okay so I'm just meant to take that a face value am I? Where's the proof? What's penalty if it turns out you've lied? What are the chances someone will even be able to investigate the whole supply chain after the fact and then they'll actually do it?
                              • marginalia_nu 1 year ago
                                You are responsible for your actions, but you act according to imperfect information, so your actions are never going to be perfectly virtuous. But then again, even with perfect information, that is rarely the case.

                                There's a pretty big difference between knowing full well something comes at a huge cost of human suffering and turning a blind eye to that, and inadvertently participating in something that turns out has unanticipated externalities. The two are not the same, and relying on the possibility of the latter scenario to justify the former is bad faith.

                              • thaumasiotes 1 year ago
                                > Those cheap clothes are subsidized by slave labor and pollution.

                                Yes, if something is cheap, it must necessarily have been produced by either (1) a person who wasn't paid very much ("slave labor"), or (2) a machine (which means pollution).

                                Is the conclusion that it's bad for things to be cheap?

                                • marginalia_nu 1 year ago
                                  Well, no? That doesn't actually follow. This is akin to countering the claim that a dog is an animal by pointing out the absurdity that this would mean all animals are dogs, when there clearly are cats and cows and so on.

                                  These statements are true about the fast fashion industry. The clothes are cheap because these things are true, they aren't true because they are cheap.

                                  They are accidental properties of cheap clothes, not necessary properties; but they are still properties of the fast fashion industry.

                                  • harimau777 1 year ago
                                    I'd word the conclusion as: it's bad for things to cheaper than what they would cost in a world without slave labor and environmental destruction.

                                    Alternatively, a slightly different conclusion is that in some situations it is bad for the market to optimize for cheapness over quality. E.g. perhaps it would be better if we optimized for people to have fewer, higher quality garments. This conclusion gets into the boot theory of poverty.

                                • ruddct 1 year ago
                                  This is not be the market success you’re thinking it is. The fast fashion industry relies on extremely dubious labor practices, massive amounts of pollution, and a culture of constant consumption and mostly disposable goods. 70lb of clothing are landfilled per person per year in the US alone (2018 numbers, today’s would certainly be higher).

                                  The article’s comparison to gambling, and now outright use of gambling game mechanics by fast fashion co’s, is the most troubling part of the industry. It relies on getting people addicted to consumption, on ‘whale’ customers who buy constantly, on a lifestyle of single-use, disposable clothing (with massive negative externalities). Society, unfortunately, pays the cost.

                                  • harimau777 1 year ago
                                    That's only possible because the quality has dropped and the labor has been outsourced to overseas sweatshops.

                                    Trying to buy well made clothing using quality materials is expensive and, as the market races to the bottom, increasingly difficult.

                                    • xrd 1 year ago
                                      I keep seeing videos and articles about how fast fashion is the second worst polluting industry in the world behind the oil industry. That's concerning to me but I don't know if it is true.
                                    • mejutoco 1 year ago
                                      I think, as a thought exercise, one can make the same argument about plastic. Even though it is cheap and there is demand it does not mean that it does not have also bad consequences (non biodegradable in that case).

                                      In the fast fashion case the bad consequences would be slave labour and pollution (from materials and from transport) for garments that do not last (usually fast fashion refers to mediocre quality items), or that are returned immediately.

                                    • brvsft 1 year ago
                                      Clothing has been relatively cheap for at least 30 years, as far as I know.

                                      https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-cpi-for-...

                                      Not sure why the link doesn't show it, but this link came up on a Google Image search for clothing vs. everything else in CPI. Here's a link to the image itself:

                                      https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/clothing.jpg

                                      And the Fed (since the image only goes out to 2013): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAPPSL (apparel) vs. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL (all items)

                                      My only point is, clothing has been cheap for a long time, and hasn't risen with inflation. I can't tell if your comment is saying that fast fashion is responsible for clothing being cheap, or what time "now" specifically refers to, so I'm not going to assume anything about that. Maybe I'm just adding to what you're saying in pointing out that clothing has been cheap for quite a while, and fast fashion has little to do with it (if anything, fast fashion is probably just a product of how affordable clothing is).

                                      Of course, it's affordable because clothes can be manufactured cheaply in quite a few countries. Seems a lot of it is made in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, etc. I doubt the workers there are paid 'well' by our standards here in the US.

                                      • achenet 1 year ago
                                        thanks for sharing those nice links ^_^

                                        I recently got into sewing recently, and I gained a new appreciation for my clothes (generally relatively cheap basics, made overseas).

                                        Somewhere in China/Vietname/Malaysia there's a person, probably a woman, who can sew like 1000x times better than me, churning out perfect garment after perfect garment for like 12 hours a day and getting paid pennies for her mindblowingly good work.

                                        I do like to think I have some talents, that I occasionally make good decisions. But man, 90% of my financial success is luck: right parents, right country, and it just so happens the only thing I'm not awful at (I tried working a mimimum wage retail job at H&M, and while I was barely competent, I feel like I was one of the worst performers there) just happens to be a skillset with lots of well paying employment.

                                      • flappyeagle 1 year ago
                                        I worked in the clothing industry in a past life.

                                        You have no idea the insane negative externalities fast fashion has on workers, the environment, local businesses, women & girls

                                        LVMH has nothing to do with it.

                                        • fergie 1 year ago
                                          Agreed. It seems to have something to do with the mainstream medias intense need to shame poor people.
                                          • AlexandrB 1 year ago
                                            I don't think poor people benefit from clothes that last only a few washes are impossible to repair due to the materials used as much as you think.

                                            I grew up in a lower middle class immigrant family and we bought many clothes second hand. A lot of the stuff coming out of Shein won't last long enough to make it to a second hand store.

                                        • mouzogu 1 year ago
                                          during years of austerity when fast fashion was a money maker it was all good

                                          now that companies are under observation for their waste and pollution suddenly it's ok to criticise and demonise it and by association the poor who relied on it

                                          - as if its the people who are responsible for the waste and exploitation of sweatshop labour that enabled it

                                          • Sankozi 1 year ago
                                            I don't think that poor people are main buyers of such such crappy products. Those things rarely last long, they are often bought and worn once or twice and thrown out or hoarded somewhere. You need to have a quite a bit of money to wear such clothing all the time.
                                            • j0hnyl 1 year ago
                                              This is called the "poor tax". The actual poor can't afford to buy things that will last a long time so they are forced to re-buy crappy things that fall apart.
                                              • Sankozi 1 year ago
                                                But fast fashion clothes are not much cheaper (or even not always cheaper) than non-fast-fashion-cheap stuff.

                                                Maybe this is semantic argument only, for me:

                                                fast fashion - fashionable (or at least trying to be fashionable), not essential, poorly made clothes

                                                "cheap clothes" - non fashionable, often (but not always) poorly made clothes

                                                Poor people buy cheap clothes and sometimes fast fashion ones. The main buyers of fast fashion clothes are people from middle and upper class.

                                          • m3kw9 1 year ago
                                            Just like a real casino if you really know how it works, you won’t play the way they want you to, you shop at Temu when you need a gift something or it’s just cheaper than Amazon or something
                                            • uxp100 1 year ago
                                              The idea that today is an age of shopping as entertainment is kinda goofy. I mean, sure, but wasn’t that also true 30 years ago? The mall era? It seems that articles that reference Cory Doctrow’s enshittification are likely to have a rosy view of the past and quality of goods in the past.

                                              Tangentially, I do a lot of the blah blah blah, repair my clothes (it’s mostly easy, but sometimes hard) buy used clothing, and try to buy from companies with transparent supply chains. SHEIN has low quality goods and likely poor labor practices, but spending 10x isn’t a guarantee of transparent supply chains and good labor practices. Some expensive brands are not better. You gotta look a little.

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                                                • aaron695 1 year ago
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