This week on News Club, we talk with Lauren Sams, fashion editor at the Australian Financial Review, about the rise of ultra-fast fashion and how businesses like Temu and Shein manage to offer such cheap clothes. In Australia alone, they are on track to record more than $2 billion in sales this year and they’re fast grabbing a huge chunk of market share both here and overseas. But there are plenty of questions about the ethics of what we’re buying from these sites.

Club Picks:

Two videos from the Wall Street Journal – ‘How Temu’s Explosive Growth Is Disrupting American E-Commerce’ and ‘How Shein Built a $66B Fast-Fashion Empire’ – are less than 10 mins each and very informative. 

A 2022 investigation by Wired, ‘Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Inside Shein’s Sudden Rise,’ explores the problems facing the company. 

This Money Talks podcast episode by The Economist called ‘Why Amazon should be afraid of Temu’. 

Lauren Sams recommended this book – Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes.

And here is The Devil Wears Prada clip Kate mentions from The Devil Wears Prada