The Shein Influencer Trip Was a New Low
The backlash crystallizes the role influencers play in capitalism and consumer culture.
People are upset with influencers who accepted a luxury trip to China from Shein, ostensibly to see how their clothes are made, only to report back to their millions of followers that factory working conditions were just fantastic. It’s only the latest influencer trip backlash to captivate the internet, and it helps crystallize the role influencers now play in capitalism and consumer culture.
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Shein is an ultra-fast fashion brand valued at $66 billion that sells vast quantities of clothes at rock-bottom prices. Time has called it “the world’s most popular fashion brand.” According to the Wall Street Journal, its 2022 revenue was $23 billion (with a profit of $800 million). If you figure the average cost of a Shein item, using Editd data, is $15.84, that means it sold nearly 1.5 billion items last year, each of which has is own manufacturing process and environmental impact. The brand has been reported to add thousands of new items to its site each day, while workers at some of its roughly 6,000 factories in China have been found to be subjected to a host of horrible conditions. These include working in makeshift factories in residential buildings, working in facilities without windows or emergency exits, and working for less than minimum wage. The documentary Inside The Shein Machine took undercover cameras into factories where workers were pulling 17-hour shifts and earning a daily wage of $20, only to be docked $16 for mistakes.
One influencer, Dani Carbonari, who went on the recent trip, said in a video that has been removed, “I was able to interview a woman who works in the fabric cutting department, and you know me, [I'm] an investigative journalist, so I asked her all of our questions.” She added, “She answered them honestly and authentically. She was very surprised by all the rumors that have been spread in the U.S.”
She finishes by saying, “I think my biggest takeaway from this trip is to be an independent thinker — get the facts and see it with your own two eyes.” Another influencer, Destene, who has more than 4 million followers, said in a TikTok of the factory floor that, “Honestly, everyone was just working like normal, like chill, sitting down, they weren’t even sweating.”
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After the backlash went viral, Carbonari posted another video on Instagram explaining that she wasn’t paid to go on the trip, she just accepted the free travel. She said that it all started when she was on a Shein trip in Lake Tahoe and “got negativity and comments,” which prompted her to pose questions to “higher-ups.” She summarized these as, “What’s up with this? What’s up with this?” And said, “I was met with a lot of straightforward — what felt like authentic answers.” She was persuaded that Shein’s manufacturing processes were OK because of audits, which she was told weed out suppliers violating international labor laws.
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A month after the Tahoe trip, Carbonari was invited to China. She said Shein told her that they wanted to put an end to “rumors” about how they operate, and she wanted to see their facilities so she could “be confident” working with them. Plus, she’s a plus-size fashion influencer, and she’s not always included on trips like this. The first day they went to a supplier, the second an innovation center, and the third a warehouse. In between, they enjoyed fancy meals and luxury accommodations. Destene got to bring a plus-one, her husband Brandon.
The trip has resulted in so much negative press and social media chatter that it seems like Shein might have been better off not bothering with it. But the company has huge financial incentive to improve its public image: Shein is reportedly eyeing an IPO in the U.S., where lawmakers have asked the Securities and Exchange Commission not to list the company without a supply-chain audit. Shein was one of several companies (including Temu, Nike, and Adidas) to receive a letter from the House China Committee last month asking if they comply with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which prohibits items containing cotton from China’s Xinjiang Region from being sold in the U.S.
Carbonari said in her most recent video that she should have done her research before going on the trip. But she still defended Shein: “It didn’t feel like a show, it didn’t feel like something that was completely put-together.” And then she offered an apology of the Real Housewife “sorry you’re upset” varietal: “I’m sorry and sad that a lot of people who don’t know me are so angry and upset.”
Shein surely picked influencers who don’t seem to understand how fashion supply chains work for a reason. Let’s assume these influencers are in the dark about clothing manufacturing. They wouldn’t know that clothes can pass through the hands of dozens of garment workers before they hit a sales floor, not just one person sitting in front of them in a factory. They wouldn’t understand that clothes are made for brands by contractors that employ subcontractors that employ subcontractors, and so on, which allows brands to say they’re not responsible for what their subcontractors do because they don’t know about them and don’t do direct business with them. They wouldn’t know that auditors are typically employed not by brands, but by the factories they’re auditing, raising serious ethics concerns. And they wouldn’t know that Rana Plaza, the garment factory that collapsed and killed 1,134 people in 2013, had actually passed auditing (with recommendations for improvements).
These influencers, by not knowing this and so much more about the labor that goes into making clothes, are in all likelihood not dissimilar from the vast majority of people living in Western nations, completely in the dark about how their clothes are made. Aja Barber, fashion sustainability expert and author of Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism, pointed out in an Instagram video that “Shein specifically picked marginalized influencers (non-white and plus-size) for this weird experiment,” and that “marginalized people in these conversations find themselves drinking from a poisoned chalice which has been confused for a seat at the table.” The fashion industry’s ingenious marketing is designed to draw our focus to beauty and brand appeal over the harsh, and at times despicable, reality. That marketing has been strengthened by the ability to host influencer trips, which allow consumers to peer into the highly curated world of a brand in an entirely new and highly addictive way.
However, influencers who work with or accept gifts from Shein represent a tiny part of the ecosystem of the brand’s success. That $66 billion valuation was determined in a fundraising round of $2 billion co-led by Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park; General Atlantic, a private equity firm based in New York; and the U.A.E. sovereign-wealth fund Mubadala. Yet little ire has been directed at the investors propping up the whole system, likely because the culture almost never gets mad at investors, but also because the people who make these investments aren’t influencers. We’re much more likely to get mad at influencers over anonymous office workers. Ire has generally lapped at Shein’s feet for years, but as evidenced by the $2 billion it just raised, that hasn’t been enough to deter people who might profit off what they’re doing.
The company has wisely not put its executives in a position where they are the faces of the business. It’s unclear if Carbonari called them “higher-ups” because either she knew their names weren’t recognizable or didn’t really know who they are herself. This is where influencers have been usefully employed: as the faces of faceless corporations with atrocious business practices and appalling environmental impact, widely accepted objects of our collective scorn.
This is so spot on. The lack of transparency in this industry abstracts the whole supply chain to the even more-informed consumer. And yet, when a top costs $15, some willful ignorance is definitely at play. I'd love to see all these influencers, and better yet, the executives and investors, sit down, sew a straight line, and then answer if they think that labor is worth $20/day.
I had no idea about the VC investments 🤯 WTF. Then again, those firms are notorious for not doing adequate due diligence when they see $$$ so I’m frankly not surprised at that list ... sigh 😞