For another five hours and 47 minutes, I can buy a Royal Blue Twist Front Cloak Sleeve Slit Back Dress for $5.90, a Striped Pattern High Neck Drop Shoulder Split Hem Sweater for $8.50, or a Solid Sweetheart Neck Crop Tube Top for $1.90. When today’s 90%-off sale ends at 8pm, the crop top will revert to its original price: $4. There are 895 items on flash sale. On today’s “New In” page, there are 8,640 items (yesterday there were 8,760). The most expensive dress of the nearly 9,000 new arrivals – a floor-length, long-sleeved, fully sequinned plus-size gown, available in five sparkly colours – is $67. The cheapest – a short, tight piece of polyester with spaghetti straps, a cowl neckline and an all-over print of Renaissance-style flowers and cherubs – is $7.
I can buy casual dresses, going-out tops, workout leggings, winter parkas, pink terry-cloth hooded rompers, purple double-breasted suit jackets with matching trousers, red pleather straight-leg pants, cropped cardigans with mushroom embroidery, black sheer lace thongs and rhinestone-trimmed hijabs. I can buy a wedding dress for $37. I can buy clothes for school, work, basketball games, proms, funerals, nightclubs, sex clubs. I see patchwork-printed overalls and black bikinis with rhinestones in the shape of a skull over each nipple designated as “punk”. I can buy Christian-girl modesty clothing and borderline fetish wear.
In the grid of product listings, a yellow rectangle indicates if a product is trending: “Trending-Plazacore”, “Trending-Western”, “Trending-Mermaidcore”, and “Trending-Y2K” tags all appear in the new arrivals. “Plazacore” is blazers and faux-tweed in pastels and beige. “Mermaidcore” means a pile up of sequins and glitter. “Western” brings up fringe jackets and bustier tops, fake leather cowboy boots and leopard-print silk blouses. The collection is unimpressive in small doses but starts feeling remarkable as you click through the pages. If I search the word “trending”, there are 4,800 items labelled with trends I’ve never heard of even after a decade-plus of closely following fashion blogs and Instagram accounts: Bikercore, Dopamine Dressing, RomCom Core, Bloke Core. Each phrase alone generates hundreds or thousands of search results of garments ready to buy and ship.
Shein is the world’s most-Googled clothing brand, the largest fast-fashion retailer by sales in the US, and one of the most popular shopping apps in the world. Its website is organised into dozens of categories: women, curve, home, kids, men and beauty, among others, though the women’s clothing section anchors the site. There are hundreds of thousands of products available, and many of them are sorted into Shein’s collections. There’s Shein EZwear, which is solid-colour knitwear and sweatpants with cutouts, and Shein Frenchy, which means delicate floral prints, lace and bows.
In the Shein EZWear collection, I find a super-short plunging V-neck dress split vertically from the waist to the hem with ruching. Long straps crisscross in a double X on the open back and cinch the waist in the front. The fabric looks like cotton jersey; it’s 91% polyester and 9% elastane (100% plastic). There are five colours available: black and brown – which are both, apparently, “HOT” – bright pink, royal blue and emerald green. The model is Photoshopped into Jessica Rabbit proportions, with a tiny waist, wide hips and enormous breasts, her collarbones jutting out several inches. She is tan and hairless, and she is headless. She poses in front of a bedroom set, crumpled white sheets, ivory macrame pillowcases, and drawings of flowers framed in gold. We see her as she sees herself in the mirror, angled to get a look at her whole outfit. She wears white sneakers, a miniature pink handbag and a gold necklace with a tiny red cherry charm. Below, under “customers also viewed”, a sea of identical headless models in black dresses reads like a Captcha image.