Mass-produced fashion slop

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fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote that's fetchpet.com slash save as a cat owner you get paid back up to 90 percent of vet bills at any vet in the u.s and canada with claims paid back in as little as two days go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote that's fetchpet.com slash save i think that we grew up pretty concerned about the amount of waste that fast fashion produces wholeheartedly reject fast fashion as much as humanly possible and try to shop in person i had to ask myself do i actually want these or did instagram just tell me i do you've probably heard of milrose avenue it's an iconic place to go shopping in la and the other day producer denise guerra was there to check out a store called milrose avenue and she said it's a great place to go shopping in la and the other day producer denise guerra was there to check out a store called detour and let's go the store's whole deal is that they sell secondhand clothes from influencers here is a viral trend right now butter yellow as we know that's founder megan russell she's filled the place with racks and racks of trendy instagram ready clothes but she loves a good throwback too hannah montana rack that's kind of crazy yeah did anyone else wear these in middle school because they're back looks like a disco ball on pants oh they're rhinestones wow how would how much would those uh this retail um let me check we probably wrote it retail 630 dollars for sale here 315. this is one this is one of our more expensive items from all ranges from princess polly all the way up to luxury so these are more expensive but you will definitely find ten dollar jeans in this rack the store is brick and mortar but like a lot of fashion right now it's shaped by the internet consumers follow influencers to dress like them right so it's like why not be able to thrift their closet directly being able to keep up with trends and also be sustainable and create a solution for influencers to just process through the sheer amount of clothing that they have because when your job is to post a new outfit every single day you just acquire so much clothing some of these girls are dropping off around 10 bags every single month full of clothes i'm not an influencer but even i had a couple bags to purge the last time i cleaned out my closet and i think that's something that you know we kind of need to grapple with as the fashion industry in general like how quickly are these trends changing and you know how does that affect the environment um and yeah also how does that affect the consumer you know they're trying to keep up with these trends and they're trying to keep up with these trends but things are just changing so rapidly i'm john quinn hill and this week unexplained to me from vox how algorithms transformed fashion and how we can be the tastemakers again i'm amy odell i'm a fashion journalist i write the back row newsletter and i host the back row podcast okay i want to go back in time a little bit let's say it's 2007 i'm walking around the mall i'm looking at the store windows for the latest fashion trend you know i'm seeing what's at forever 21 i'm seeing what's at charlotte ruse how did these stores decide what they were gonna sell i think at that time fashion really trickled down more from the runways and tastemakers who were appointed um you know the anna winters of vogue you were leading you were not following or john galliano at dior i just make dresses what's the big deal or carl lagerfeld at chanel evolution cannot be stopped and will not be stopped tomorrow morning these styles from these cult of personality designers would end up in the pages of vogue and they would trickle down to the mall brands or the fast fashion brands so taste was really coming from on high let's say i think we all know that scene from the devil wears prada it's seared into like everyone's brain now it's miranda priestly what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue it's not turquoise it's not lapis it's actually cerulean explaining how high fashion finds its way into the mainstream and then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers i'm gonna filter down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin is that still the case today i think you could argue that it's not the case at all anymore when that movie was made we didn't have the internet the way we know it today we didn't have social media we didn't have instagram uh which is crazy to think about but social media has changed everything and now what we're seeing is that mall brands fast fashion brands maybe there was higher-end brands out there doing this too they're looking for algorithmic inputs from the internet to figure out what people like and what will sell and then they're making products that way retailers take fewer risks designers are asked to make what the data says people already want the supply chain expert i see a terrifying industrial evolution this is not fast fashion this is real-time fashion all the brands that you can think of the nice brands the zara the forever 21 the opali lissabon sheen has them sheen has been a juggernaut in the fast fashion space and in fact people call it ultra fast fashion or i've also heard it called instant fashion why is it called instant fashion well the way it works is they use algorithms to track trends and what people are interested in and then they make a few hundred of a very large number of different items and they test demand and this model allowed them this is according to the new york times to introduce around 4 700 new apparel styles per day zara by comparison was producing around 20 000 a year oh my gosh that's huge yeah sheen was revolutionary in pairing technology you know with the ability to produce things cheaply quickly in china can you talk a little bit about that algorithmic input a little bit how do these companies decide what they're gonna make and sell to people that's probably like top secret information that they have or a top secret formula but what we do know and the wall street journal had a really interesting story about this brand addicted which is sort of like a tween or teen women's clothing brand and they're looking at according to the wall street journal what their customer is searching on the internet uh what they're engaging with on social media and what celebrities like hayley bieber wear and uh their founder said that if she likes something we make more of it and we are praying they have the hayley bieber jean i just got the hayley bieber gap jeans let's see if they're worth the hype if she doesn't like something it goes away and he said they had already moved on from barrel jeans wow oh my gosh time to throw my pants away question mark question mark i know it's crazy because i just started getting barrel jeans my whole life and i'm like oh my gosh i'm myself something that comes up time and time again when we talk about technology when we talk about the internet is the inchification you know things become slop have we seen that in fashion as well and what does that look like i think we are seeing it in fashion you know she and might sell you a top for five bucks or they used to uh pre-tariffs or a dress for 10 bucks and these pieces are not designed to be worn for very long you can order something from there and that shit will be paper thin i was wearing a pair of sheen shorts to the gym and guess what the crotch split open mid-workout and they're so cheap that you just go and you replenish and you buy more that to me i think is fashion slop however i also want to acknowledge that a lot of people are are not shopping at sheen because it's because they're pro slop a lot of people are shopping at these fast fashion brands or these ultra fast fashion brands because that's what they can afford i don't care what anyone says i will continue shopping at sheen and timu especially if i can get 50 worth of outfits i wasn't making that much money so guess what i did gang i went where i could afford there are just so many options. How do you make sense of it all? I find shopping to be kind of less pleasant than ever before, maybe precisely for that reason. I don't particularly enjoy the process of shopping online and sifting and, you know, you search something in Google and it's going to give you sponsored results or even if you search something, you know, wherever you shop, like, how do you know you're getting the best thing for you, you know what I mean? So I think that it's overwhelming to shop nowadays. I wonder, this mass production, this kind of everything goes, is that promoting more personal style because kind of everything is out there or are we seeing less personal style because algorithms are kind of telling us what to wear and providing what we wear? I would say probably more. I just think it's, you know, there's so many options available for people when it comes to clothing and accessories. And I think people can be really creative, like in a way that they probably couldn't be as creative when they didn't have as many options when, you know, I'm a millennial too and we were teens or tweens and we were going to the mall and that was kind of our set of options was what was available to us in the mall. Now there's just so many more options. In some ways, I feel like fast fashion has made dressing originally harder, but I actually think it's more of a, you know, it's more of a on Instagram, it's much easier to find smaller designers and fashion inspiration from creators who are wearing just really niche brands and original combinations and making a lot of their own stuff. And so I actually feel like I'm seeing people in my life dressing more and more individually. People are really savvy about fashion now. They know, you know, in more detail how their clothes are made. They know how their clothes are made. They know about different designers and, you know, different vintage trends and different vintage looks that were significant in their day. So I think that the internet has really opened up kind of a world of possibilities for creative expression, I guess, when it comes to getting dressed. That particular brand of fashion savvy may feel new, but it's actually a return to that particular brand of fashion savvy may feel new, but it's actually a return to our old ways. That's next. Support for Explain It To Me comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Here's something that might surprise you. Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. That's according to a study from a pet insurance company. Be prepared with Fetch Pet Insurance. Fetch is the most complete coverage for dogs and cats, according to ConsumerAdvocate.org. Fetch covers accidents, illnesses, diagnostics, and more. Every vet in the U.S. and Canada is in network. You can build a plan that fits your budget and, once approved, claims are paid back in as little as two days. To learn more, go to FetchPet.com slash save. That's FetchPet.com slash save. Building for free today at Framer.com slash Explained for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's Framer.com slash Explained. Rules and restrictions may apply. I'm JQ. This is Explain It To Me. My name's Avery Truffleman, and I make a podcast about fashion called Articles of Interest. Avery knows all about the history of why we wear what we wear. Avery knows all about the history of fashion and how it got made. Our clothes are mostly mass-produced now, but that was not the case in the 19th century. For the most part, you are buying cloth. You go and you buy pieces of cloth at a market, and then you bring them to a tailor, or you sew them yourself, and that's how you get clothes. Initially, there were no women's clothes, ready-made. And this is part of where it became this very feminized activity to read the fashion plates and keep up with fashion. Avery knows all about the history of fashion. You had to sew your own stuff. You had to be like, what's everybody wearing? What's going on? What's a fashion plate? It's like an early pressing of like, here's what the styles are, usually from France. But yeah, it's this idea of like, they're not ready-made clothes for you. You got to figure it out yourself. You got to figure out what everybody else is doing and either instruct your seamstress or make it or, you know, later on in the 20th century, buy a pattern, go to Paris. Some people like to trace this all the way back to the court of Louis XIV in France and how he dictated consistent changes of the seasons, of fashion seasons, in order to support the French silk industry. And he would intentionally change the colors and change the patterns so he could tell who was buying and who was supporting the silk makers in Lyon and who wasn't. It was a very shrewd move. One, to support domestic industry. Two, it was considered a bit of a strategic move to maintain his court because he was like, if everyone's so worried about how they're dressing, no one's going to come for my throne. And it was like an ultimate form of distraction. So that's the very, very root of it. That's the very root of like why France is fashion capital and why there are these consistent season changes is because the government of France has long invested in their fashion industry. That is why. They used the changing of the seasons intentionally. It really wasn't until, I would say, mid-1800s that it becomes to be a more widespread practice that you buy clothes that have already been made. OK, so at this point, Paris was very much the center of the universe for fashion. And, you know, it still kind of is. Did ready-made clothes change that at all? This is a very American phenomenon because it was this idea that in this ostensibly democratic experiment, we're all supposed to, we all, meaning like white men, are all supposed to dress equally. It's like this amazing new opportunity where, you know, back in Europe, the kings wore jewels and the beggars wore rags, but not this new democratic experiment. The statesman is going to dress the same as the merchant is going to dress. The same as, and this was a source of real moral panic, like maybe even the common criminal, like anyone could kind of wear a suit and you didn't really know who was who or what their background is. It created a lot of anxiety, but it was also this idea of a fresh start. And when you think about it, this sort of invents the practice of shopping. And it should be clear that, like, you were probably only doing this if you were a white man, which explains a lot. Shopping used to be considered a very masculine activity because they're like, I don't have time to sew. I don't have time to go to the tailor. I'm thinking about important things. I'm buying my clothes ready-made. Where were they going to buy those ready-made clothes? Brooks Brothers is always the company that I go back to. They didn't invent ready-made clothes, but they were really on the vanguard of it. And they're still around, which is incredible. And initially, ready-made. Ready-made clothes were considered sort of lower class. And then they opened a store in Midtown and they happened very slowly that, OK, then it was upper class men. Then they started making eventually they started making clothes for women. This idea of mass produced clothing as reputable fashion, as something that can compete with, you know, a couture house in Europe. That's been growing extremely slowly over time. That growth sped up around the time a lot of American innovation did. World War II. France was occupied by the Nazis. And Avery says that, along with the boom in labor here at home, gave the U.S. what it needed to make its own mark on clothing. The ready-to-wear fashion industry is very American. Like, we made that. And a big part of why is because we had a lot of labor. We had a lot of immigrants. We had a lot of, like, women working at home who were very easily exploited. And we lost, not entirely, there still are some garments made in America, but by and large. large, we lost our manufacturing capacity somewhat intentionally during the Cold War as a way to fight communism. And then later in the 1970s? We were encouraged to support the foreign markets in China and to prop them up to support capitalism. You know, a factory is just a bunch of sewing machines and poorly paid workers. It's very easy to set up. And Avery says that kind of production led to the fast fashion empires we have now. It's very hard to just buy good quality clothes at a decent price. A lot of these manufacturers, especially abroad, have minimums. Like they need to, you know, they're like, if you want us to make this shirt, you have to order 100,000 of this shirt, like huge numbers. And so it's more expensive for smaller brands to make smaller ones. And so it's more expensive for us to make smaller brands to make smaller ones. And so it's more expensive for smaller brands to make smaller quantities, which is why these like smaller brands end up being so expensive. And so now I think a lot of people looking to buy clothes are left with the choice of like, do I want cheap slop or very expensive, nice clothes? It's very hard to find something in the middle. Sometimes I'll just walk down the street and in a crowded thoroughfare and be like, look at all these clothing stores. They're packed. Racks and racks and racks and racks of clothes. And like, who's going to buy them all? Where are they all going? And it is really all to feed our voracious desire for novelty and variety. But it's hard because I don't want to just blame the consumer. I don't want to be like, it's, it's our fault. We have to stop shopping. It's just the way that these systems have developed that making mass quantities of clothes in any color, any size, any fit you can imagine on like many floors of many buildings. It's the nature of capitalism. It's just supposed to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow. One place those mass produced clothes end up? On the racks of your local resale shop. That's coming up. Support for TakeSpline comes from Talkiatry. When you're struggling with your mental health, the last thing you want to deal with is a complicated search to find the help you need. Talkiatry makes it easy to see a licensed psychiatrist online who takes your insurance in just a few days. 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Talkiatry.com slash explained to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's T-A-L-K-I-A-T-R-Y.com slash explained to get matched in minutes. Talkiatry.com slash explained. Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month-end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on. And that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash AF. This is Explained to Me. I'm JQ. Consider the thrift store. It's the place you go for clothes when you're on a budget, or if you want to find something you can't get anywhere else. For the last sort of probably a hundred years, actually, it has had lots of moments where it's been cool within countercultures. That's Hannah Marriott. She's a former fashion editor at The Guardian. I think it's because people within countercultures, whether it's grunge or the surrealists in the 1920s or like the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, secondhand clothing was cool kind of because of the stigma. The stigma of being poor. I really think that has changed a lot recently. I think it was a gradual shift anyway, but I think it was very accelerated by various sort of things that happened in the pandemic, including just this absolute sort of influx of apps that had been around for a while, but got very, very popular during that time, particularly among younger Gen Z consumers who, again, were looking for that sort of individuality. Screen time on these apps sort of rocketed, thrifting became a bit of a sort of social currency on social media platforms, especially on TikTok. Yo, I'm literally shaking, bro. I just had my craziest thrift haul of all time. The reason you can't find anything at a thrift store is because you don't know how to thrift. But yeah, it's an absolutely vast ecosystem at the moment. No one else does it like The RealReal. Thousands of new arrivals daily. She just discovered the sweet sound of earning and saving money on vintage. Sell your clothes with no selling fees on Depop. Buy what you love with the extra cash. And all of them have slightly different business models, slightly different sort of fees that they charge and so on and slightly different audiences that they're reaching. I think the sort of the fact that thrifting could be cool, that you could find individual pieces and so on, became much more mainstream as an idea during that time. And I think the stigma has really gone away and it's almost like reversed. One of the biggest secondhand shops here in the U.S. is still Goodwill. Goodwill has a large selection of blue jeans, denim shirts, denim jackets. You'll also find great buys on T-shirts. And when you shop your Goodwill retail store, you support employment and training programs for people with barriers to employment. Can you walk me through how Goodwill has adapted and changed to the secondhand boom? Yeah, that's incredibly interesting as well, because I think neighborhood. Thrift stores of that kind are the sort of stores that people on lower income do rely on more. It's somewhere that people have often been going for decades to get clothes that they can afford. But a lot of shoppers feel strongly that they've gone up like a lot, that you can't find bugs anymore, that the bargains get sent online to either their website or are bought by resellers who sell them for an inflated price online. And it's quite hard to get to the bottom of exactly how. All of that is especially because Goodwill is run as sort of like I think it's like one hundred and fifty autonomous sort of sort of like franchises and each of them set their own prices. But what I would say is you are seeing things like the Goodwill branch in Connecticut is running this sort of thrift tour where they're charging seventy five bucks to go on a on a coach. Goodwill has some bargains. You're gonna get a deal. Sign up for the next bus trip. You'll even get a meal. And you get like early access to a Goodwill store and then you get to go to another. But it's like, you know, you used to be able to buy like ten things in Goodwill for seventy five bucks. So, yeah, I, you know, I think back to college and there is this thrift store. It's no longer with us. People would go to Georgia Thrift and a lot of folks would be like, OK, I'm in college. I have fifteen dollars. I need to go to Georgia Thrift. I need blazers for these internships or, you know, you always hear, hey, go to the Goodwill in the rich neighborhoods because that's where they're dropping off their designer stuff. But this is sounding like a real barrier to the people who need the secondhand market. Like, what's up with that? So I think that is quite sort of coordinated by management. There's Google Lens now. So you can just take a picture of a shoe and then, you know, then people. I think that's one of the differences between like the Goodwill model and online is that online is a bit of a waiting game. I think people expect to have their products on on the website for months and they might have to reprice them three times. It's a sort of a long term kind of situation, whereas you would expect the products in Goodwill to be priced to move because it is a 50% discount. It's a sort of a physical location that's getting a lot of donations. But it sounds like there has been quite a lot of pressure in certain of the branches to match the prices to the online prices. And, yeah, I do think I do think people get left out, people who are already worried about money at the moment. It's so interesting that thrifting used to be this edgy, original thing where you find bargains, you find things that other people don't have. But it's it's. It's really gone mainstream, like, has it sold out? gone the way of fashion trends before it is it has it gone the way of like punk rock where it's a little mainstream and people are like it's not what it used to be you know i i remember you know when i was much younger people would say oh you got that you got that second hand oh you know and i just don't think anyone would ever say that now because that's kind of how we shop um but i still think it is great if you find something original that you love that no one else has and i still think you're more likely to find it second hand um or actually in certain other under the radar brands than you are in fast fashion and i think maybe this is a bit of a reaction to sort of it's been probably like what 30 years of fast fashion just getting faster and faster and faster and i think we're all feeling a bit tired of that sort of business model so we're trying to find other ways of doing it and i think it's a good thing that we're all feeling a bit tired of that other ways to to shop and express ourselves that's it for this week before we go we want your help with an upcoming episode the longevity movement is almost inescapable we're constantly being told to optimize now that message is moving below the bell we want to know what messages have you seen lately about reproductive health are you having an any trouble separating the science from the snake oil give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or email askvox at vox.com if you enjoy listening to this podcast consider becoming a vox member it comes with its perks including ad-free versions of this and other vox podcasts check out vox.com members to learn more this episode was produced by denise guerra it was edited by jenny lotten fact check by melissa hirsch engineered by david tattashore our executive producer is miranda kennedy and i'm your host john glenhill thank you so much for listening i'll talk to you soon bye trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack that's why i'm here that's why the guardian is launching stateside with kai wright and carter sherman a conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world three times a week hosts kai and carter utilize all the reporting resources the guardian has to discuss the news international affairs climate culture sports lifestyle fashion and wellness and the guardian is not billionaire owned meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference go to the guardian.com slash stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube that's the guardian.com slash stateside running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project one app for accounting another for inventory another for sales and somehow none of them talk to each other that's where odoo comes in an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together from sales and accounting to business management to business management to accounting to inventory and marketing all in one powerful platform no messy integrations no bouncing between tabs and best of all no spreadsheets stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system try for free today at odoo.com slash vox that's odoo.com slash vox