Forever 21 was young once and ready to change the world, one improbably inexpensive top at a time. It helped popularize fast fashion in the 2000s by making quick-turnaround knockoffs of runway looks and then selling them cheap in chaotic mall stores. Along with H&M, Zara and Topshop, it inspired much hand-wringing over how fast fashion was ecologically indefensible, with viral videos showing fast-fashion waste piled up in veritable mountains (scaled by goats!) along the shores of Ghana.
So it must be a good thing that Forever 21 is bankrupt and closing 350 or so stores, right? Maybe this latest generation of under-21s is finally done chasing empty trends with disposable looks? Surveys show that 63 percent of Gen Z-ers prefer to support brands that share their values, and 72 percent consider sustainability an important factor in purchasing decisions.
And yet, despite the havoc fast fashion has brought to the planet, particularly the global south, nothing has stopped it, or probably will. Forever 21 died not because of consumer consciousness raising but because of the bottom line: It couldn’t keep up with even faster fashion. In its bankruptcy filing, it blames competition from its online-only competitors Shein and Temu, both with roots in China — sellers of ultra-fast fashion — for its demise.
It’s not that people don’t want to be ethical consumers. It’s just that sustainability in fashion is not something most people can afford if they still want to dress in the latest style.
“Unfortunately, I think it’s pretty compelling to buy a $7 pair of jeans if you’re not rich,” Ken Pucker, professor of practice at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the former chief operating officer of Timberland, told me last year. “To a consumer, there’s no real functional benefit of sustainable fashion. Just perhaps a psychic benefit that they’re helping the planet.”
In the absence of regulation, the onus is on consumers to shop sustainably. And many shoppers have been trained to get their dopamine hit of a new ’fit for far less than anything that, say, the upmarket upcycled brand Bode can offer.
Founded in 1984 in Los Angeles, Forever 21 thrived on consumer impatience, giving people what they wanted before they even knew they wanted it. Clothing at traditional retailers could take 10 months to go from sketch to store. Forever 21 took one month. If Diane von Furstenberg sold a silk printed minidress for $325, Forever 21 would sell basically the same dress for $32. Shoppers got hooked on the pace and the price.
So how did these clothes get made so cheaply? A 2016 U.S. Labor Department investigation found that some California garment workers employed by Forever 21’s suppliers were earning as little as $4.50 an hour (state minimum wage was $10) putting labels and other finishings on tops in a basement in downtown Los Angeles. In response to these reports, a Cosmopolitan article urged readers to “shop less and spend more on better quality, ethically produced clothes.”
While Forever 21 fended off bad press and lawsuits from designers upset about their work being knocked off, the entrepreneur Chris Xu was coming up with a faster way to get fashion to shoppers. He began Shein as SheInside in 2008 and figured out how to use algorithms to scan social media and websites for ideas for products, which in-house designers and contracted factories then produced. Big data would know what customers wanted. And thanks to newly flexible manufacturing technology, Shein could create test runs of about 100 products to figure out how many to make, which meant it didn’t hold on to much unsold inventory. Shein could go from idea to product in 10 days.
Using social media and influencers to push its $10 dresses and $7 tops, Shein saw its revenue explode to $38 billion in 2024. (Though many items cost less, Shein’s clothes average $14 an item, according to a 2023 report by the website Business of Fashion and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company.) Forever 21’s revenue, meanwhile, peaked at $4.4 billion back in 2015.
Shein did not win by being more careful with its workers. The 2022 documentary “Untold: Inside the Shein Machine” by Britain’s Channel 4 included footage of employees who worked up to 18 hours a day making hundreds of clothing items on a daily salary of as little as $20, which could drop to as low as $7 if they made mistakes, with one day off a month. In May 2024, an investigation by the Swiss watchdog group Public Eye found similar conditions at Shein suppliers.
Shein, which has been trying to go public in London after efforts in the United States were thwarted, in part over forced labor concerns, has pledged to clean up the working conditions. Following the Public Eye investigation, the company admitted to finding instances of child labor in its supply chain. And while the company had 5,800 suppliers in 2023 it performed fewer than 4,000 audits.
As fast fashion’s biggest polluter, Shein sold roughly 1.3 million new styles in 2022. (Zara sold around 35,000.) Shein nearly doubled carbon emissions from 2022 to 2023 to 18.4 million tons, or more than the yearly emissions of four coal-powered plants. (Zara’s owner, Inditex, produced about the same. Nike produced less, at 10.5 million tons.)
Forever 21’s strategy of opening lots of stores in malls seems quaint now, however much the bankruptcy has made some people nostalgic for impulse purchases of “But First, Coffee” sweatshirts. Today, Shein faces competition from Temu, which joined the American market in 2022 and had the most downloaded free app in Apple’s U.S. store in 2024. Last year, Amazon decided it wanted in on ultra-fast fashion and opened a discounted marketplace. It advertised prices as “crazy low.”
Sustainability has been sold to consumers as an aspirational attribute, something worth paying extra for. Luxury brands do it most effectively. Even though their supply chains can be murky and they sometimes face accusations of shoddy labor practices, they produce less and market their goods as timeless investment pieces. In 2020, Gucci started its Off the Grid collection, featuring nylon derived from “abandoned fishing nets, old carpets and other scraps” used to make a vest priced at $1,980. Hermès, seller of Birkin bags that cost upward of $10,000, advertises its goods as sustainable. Bode, the “slow fashion” brand known for making new clothing out of vintage and deadstock fabrics, charges $650 for nylon tearaway pants. On the more affordable end of the “sustainable” fashion spectrum, Reformation’s dresses go for $150 to $300 or more — a price that is still well out of reach for many consumers.
These days, 44 percent of Gen Z-ers in the United States make at least one purchase from Shein each month. But don’t blame the youth: Having been weaned on Forever 21, the most likely Temu shoppers are millennials, followed by Gen X-ers. In this uncertain economy, it’s not just what the people want. It’s all that many Americans can afford.
Amy Odell is the author of the Back Row newsletter and “Anna: The Biography.”
Source photographs by khvost, mikespics, JeffGoulden and Annaspoka/Getty Images
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