The "Stop Shein" Campaign Begins in France

1000 new models are added every day, with prices starting at 10 euros or less. It seems like a fashion lover’s dream, and it is what the Chinese fashion firm Shein sells on their website.

However, if you chose to wake up from this dream, the cost of this lifestyle is terrible. With reports of using slave labor, cheap and highly toxic materials, and aggressive marketing toward the fast use of clothing, the Chinese company has been targeted by environmentalists and human rights activists.

France is one of the new battlegrounds against Shein. Place Publique is a French political party that focuses on issues related to the environment and social problems in the country.

On June 8, the organization launched the campaign “Stop Shein” in France. After one week, the initiative already has received more than 32.000 signatures. The party hopes to grab the attention of the Minister of Economy, who is responsible for making policies toward the fashion industry. According to Place Publique, the objective is:

"to regulate SHEIN and Fast Fashion with a legislative and regulatory shield aimed at fighting against "cultural obsolescence" by regulating advertising, such as marketing strategies that encourage overconsumption in the street, on social networks, or in the media, and delisting or blocking any website of a brand that puts on the market a number of new references greater than or equal to 1000 per day."

Place Publique

Shein’s objective is to be the dominant player in the fast fashion industry. They are competing with companies such as Sweden’s H&M and Spain’s ZARA. These European companies were “pioneers” in terms of terrible manufacturing policies. Shein used this business strategy and exploited it on an unprecedented industrial scale. As a result, Shein has used crude techniques to achieve unstoppable expansion in the Label.

One of these methods is to create their clothes out of very low-cost materials. Polyester, a petroleum-based material that is easy to use for creating clothes but exceedingly harmful to the environment when dumped in the trash, is the most well-known material used by the company. Shein sells these products with the expectation that their customers will wear them only a few times, resulting in a never-ending cycle of harmful waste.

The cost of the components are also supported by a network of low-wage labor in at least 6,000 Chinese factories. Through a documentary, the British TV “Channel 4” discovered that the factory workers were driven to perform 17-hour hours to produce hundreds of garments per day. In one factory, they were paid a daily basic salary of $20. That salary was subsequently reduced by $14 if any clothes were defective.