Everlane Represented a Millennial Ideal. Is It Dead?

The news is nearly too rich, too on-the-nose, as a sign of the times.

Over the weekend, Puck reported that Everlane, the 15-year-old fashion brand founded on “radical transparency,” is being sold to the fast fashion colossus Shein. The unruly Gen Z little brother was reportedly subsuming its high-minded millennial sibling to the tune of $100 million. We reached out to Everlane to confirm this news, but it declined to comment.

What was radical transparency anyway? A shorthand for convincing customers and investors that they were remaking the world through supposedly ethical corporate culture and manufacturing practices.

Despite Everlane’s website continuing to crow about its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, the reported Shein acquisition certainly looks like an ignominious new chapter for a company built on the notion that you can feel virtuous even while consuming a new ribbed sweater or light washed jeans.

That time has, evidently, passed.

Everlane arrived in a moment when we thought companies would help us change the world for the better. Facebook, we thought, would connect us all. Uber would allow you to be your own boss. With Everlane, you could dress well without spending luxury prices and not feel guilty about it. (It should be noted that Everlane has faced accusations that its premise of transparency was a smoke screen. A report in The Times in 2020 found that its outward ideals masked a culture of anti-Black behavior and union busting.)

Everlane’s generic staples looked right for the moment in which it thrived — one in which millennial “blanding” in advertising and fashion saw the rise of brands like Away Luggage, Warby Parker and Glossier. Everlane was more polished than normcore — more office appropriate with its roster of cashmeres and wool work trousers — but it still offered a palate of sanitized beiges, browns and grays. Covid hurt Everlane as its office-casual offering turned inessential.

Today, the “shopping sustainably” crowd congregates on Depop, where buying used clothes is considered more eco-conscious and they can find a variegated assortment of stuff. Gen Z-ers habits are driven more by finding their “personal style” than by adopting a virtue-signaling uniform.

In the end, people seem to care much less about where and how their clothes were made, or who was making them, than they did about getting a good deal.

Look at Quince, a company that emerged seven years after Everlane, which was recently valued at $10 billion.

Quince is a slick, well-branded dupe emporium. It sells a $50 cotton sweater with an American flag echoing a Ralph Lauren staple. It offers a $178 Italian-made tote that appears similar to one from Sezane. It sells $50 sunglasses that look as if they could be Saint Laurent. Quince doesn’t run from these comparisons, it broadcasts them. Its product pages list the brands that it is knocking off, detailing how its items share similar attributes but at a better price. (Quince does claim that its products are “sustainably made” but it is hazier than Everlane on what that means and that claim is not central to its marketing.)

The comparison is compelling, especially as people feel increasingly squeezed. If you’re choosing between a $178 cashmere sweater from Everlane and a nearly identical one from Quince for $50, are you willing to pay the extra $128 to feel more principled? The answer, it seems, is no.

Quince, you could say, is “transparent” too — about how other luxury companies are ripping you off. Quince’s success proves that people don’t actually want to be noble. They want to be savvy.

Gucci’s Times Square Takeover

In Japan, the term salaryman refers to the country’s white collar cogs who trudge to office jobs in ordinary black suits and ties. It’s not really a term we use in America that much. This is the land of rugged individualism! Americans prefer not to think of themselves as worker bees in wool. Yet sitting at the Gucci show on Saturday night — sitting that is, inside a makeshift pen in Times Square — salarymen came to mind.

The show’s opening section included a troop of young men in rectangular eyeglasses, black suits and black ties. Incongruously techy backpacks hung from their backs. One had a Gucci corporate ID dangling off a lanyard.

These men could have been Goldman Sachs greenhorns, riding the subway to summer internships. I see young men like this daily on my commute. OK, their backpacks are Patagonia, not Gucci. And they’ve lost the ties. But still, this character felt familiar.

Overall, there was something of drag, or cosplay, to this, Demna’s third collection at Gucci. Women as forbidding ladies who lunch in off-the-shoulder furs, their Gucci bags swaying from the crook of their arms. Tom Brady, he of seven Super Bowl rings and a freakishly geometric jawline, looked like the Terminator at Berghain in a glossy moto jacket and matching leather trousers. I could have sworn I’d seen the kid in lime green sunglasses and a tan trench with a stack of books in hands crossing Washington Square Park.

At Gucci, Demna is creating something closer to Ralph Lauren than his predecessor Alessandro Michele. He’s operating less like a form-shattering designer than a merchant of aspiration. Could I tell you that any of the customary calf-high boots or logoed totes or jeans were more dazzling than the fact that Gucci was able to cordon off part of Times Square for this show? That Brady (and Paris Hilton and Cindy Crawford) modeled in the show? That they commandeered every billboard in sight to broadcast ads for Gucci products real and imagined? No, I couldn’t.

But this is the strategy: Make the brand feel omnipresent, imperial even, so that next time you want a bag or a shoe, you think of Gucci first. The specific item? Well, you’ll sort that out once you’re in store. For more on Gucci’s cruise show, read Vanessa Friedman’s review.

Other things worth knowing about:

Some news: Celine will be staging a men’s show next month during Paris Fashion Week, its first under Michael Rider.
And some great news if you live in New York and like offbeat cardigans: Jake Burt is finally returning to the city. He’s popping up on Canal Street on Saturday and Sunday.
My favorite tidbit from the Gucci show: The brand had to take over Blue Fin Sushi on the corner of West 47th Street and Broadway to house and dress the models before the show. The logistics of these shows can be as interesting and even more mind-boggling than the clothes.
At the Gucci show, I ran into Sebastian Jean, the fashion director of Highsnobiety, wearing a windbreaker from Vuori, the finance guy-approved athleisure brand. This week news also leaked out that Miles Pope, a longtime editor at GQ and Vanity Fair, is about to start working at Vuori. I asked Jean if Vuori was becoming … cool? “It’s happening,” he said. We’ll see.
On Monday, it was announced that yet another GQ vet, Sam Hine, was jumping to New York magazine, where he will be senior men’s style editor. Hine will write a newsletter and contribute to the magazine’s first issue dedicated to men’s style in its nearly 60-year run. I messaged Hine to ask why he felt it was the right time to go all in on men, and he said:

“There was a lot of pent-up interest at New York to explore men’s style. And New York, like other magazines, has been experiencing demand from readers and advertisers for more print issues. Men’s style has become such a rich text in recent years, especially in NYC. Ten years ago, when I was starting out, it felt like a fairly niche topic, but this spring you couldn’t go a block downtown without seeing a guy cosplaying JFK Jr. because of ‘Love Story.’”