Identify yourself in ideals. If you could be anyone in the world, who would it be? Look no further because whatever your answer is, you can now buy it on Shein.
Trends and aesthetics now arrive as purchasable identities. This is the office siren: square-frame glasses, pencil skirts, and button-ups paired with corporate tolerance of a seductress; or the minimalistic clean girl of capitalised wellness: slicked-back buns and Pilates. Aesthetics have been repackaged as easy-to-attain archetypes of people that you can now purchase with the insertion of your credit card information and a matcha in your hand.
Trends materialise daily, on every social media platform, but the dupe market and fast fashion grow faster. Estimates of how many new listings brands like Shein add daily range from around two thousand to as many as ten thousand, depending on the year and the storefront measured. Whatever the precise figure, the direction is undisputed. A new identity is now five dollars, plus shipping. The true consideration lies in the ruined legacy and loss of identity within our society’s fashion.
Defining vintage: what it was and what it will never be again
Vintage is vintage by survival, not resemblance. It is a capsule of its era, not a mimicry of it.
In the twentieth century, Chanel put women in jersey, a fabric previously used for men’s underwear, and made the case that clothing could move with a body instead of restraining it. In 1947, Dior came in with the New Look: cinched, structured, and deliberately extravagant after years of rationing. The positions were opposed, and that was the point. Both were arguments about how women occupy space, made in wool and silk, and built to outlast the argument. A jacket made in 1955 can be worn in 2026 because it was made with that assumption in mind.
Then, from the 1950s onward, came the great evil: polyester, a fabric born in a laboratory and built for environmental ruin, spun from plastic. Polyester now accounts for roughly 59 per cent of global fibre production, about 88 per cent of which is fossil-based, according to Textile Exchange’s 2025 figures. Fibre genuinely recycled from discarded textiles accounts for less than one per cent of the global market.
However, the obituary of vintage needs qualifying. The global secondhand apparel market grew 13 per cent in 2025 to an estimated 257 billion US dollars, roughly a tenth of all apparel spending, and is projected to reach 393 billion by 2030. On the face of it, vintage is not dying at all. But the same research names the central problem: demand is building, and supply is not. There are more buyers chasing old clothing worth owning than there are garments to go round. That is the shape of death that takes form. Death by scarcity in a rising market that does what scarcity always does to a price, changing a market of necessity and sustainability to a capitalised one.
Vintage now describes a look that can be manufactured new, on a Tuesday, in polyester. You can buy a distressed band tee for a group that predates your birth, printed last month. In a market where most of what is produced is plastic, made to a price point that assumes a season of wear, what is left to be vintage in fifty years?
Dupes, copyright, and the purchasable status
Dupes are, for the most part, legal by design. In the United States, garment design is largely excluded from copyright, with protection extending only to features separable from the garment’s utilitarian function. Star Athletica v Varsity Brands (2017), in fact, loosened that test, making surface decoration easier to protect, and in doing so threw the remaining exclusion into sharper relief. Cut, drape and silhouette, the things that make a garment that garment, stayed outside copyright entirely. The EU is more generous, offering registered protection alongside a short unregistered right. Across both systems, the practical result holds: a silhouette can be copied freely, and usually is.
Small labels and luxury houses alike can be copied to near-exact likeness for a fraction of the price. In 2021, Elexiay, a Black-owned, Lagos-based crochet label whose artisans spend four to five days on each hand-made piece, accused Shein of copying its Amelia sweater, a 330-dollar garment reproduced by Shein as a machine-made version selling for 17 dollars. Its founder, Elyon Adede, wrote that she felt “crushed” to see her work “reduced to a machine-made copy.” Shein pulled the item only after the post went viral.
Legal scholarship has long argued this is a feature rather than a defect. Raustiala and Sprigman’s account of the piracy paradox holds that low IP protection accelerates trend cycles, induces obsolescence and thereby drives demand. That argument has always been made about the industry’s revenue. Restated in terms of the garment, durability is a function of cost, and cost is set on the factory floor. It is that free copying compresses the commercial life of a design to a matter of weeks, and no producer specifies a forty-year fabric for a silhouette with a six-week window. Obsolescence is designed because the law has made the alternative commercially irrational. A regime that accelerates the trend cycle therefore manufactures the scarcity of durable clothing, and with it the scarcity of anything that could one day be vintage.
The privilege of sustainability
It is futile to discuss sustainable fashion and the lack thereof without acknowledging the necessity and privilege that attend sustainability and quality in the modern fashion ecosystem. In a market that capitalises on quality and status, the ability to buy sustainably depends on the ability to buy at all. Producing a garment sustainably is itself costlier and harder than pushing one through a low-wage factory, which is why the sustainable option comes with a premium.
Secondhand markets have always had two constituencies: people who shop secondhand because it is cheaper, and people who shop secondhand because it looks a certain way. For most of modern history, they did not compete, because the second group barely existed.
The rise of platforms like Depop and Vinted has placed both groups in direct competition over the same finite stock, and prices rise first at the cheapest end, because that is where the aesthetic buyer finds the best margin. A three-dollar rack becomes a fifteen-dollar rack, then a curated rail at forty. Sustainability framed purely as consumer virtue produces an ethical practice whose costs land on the people who were already doing it out of necessity, while the benefit is captured further up the chain.
This is not an abstraction in Southeast Asia, where the secondhand trade arrives literally by the bale. Bundle shops in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand are stocked from compressed sacks of used clothing exported from the Global North. As resellers abroad cream off the most valuable pieces for Depop and Vinted, the bales that reach a bundle shop are lower in grade and higher in price than they were a decade ago. The buyer at the end of that chain inherits the residue of a market being optimised several countries upstream.
Legally speaking, what now?
The most interesting recent development in fashion law is that durability has finally become a regulated property rather than a marketing adjective.
The EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, extends ecodesign requirements well beyond energy-related products and names durability, repairability and recycled content among its central pillars. Textiles are a priority category, though the delegated acts setting the specific textile requirements remain in development, and the Digital Product Passport is being phased in by sector rather than all at once. France moved earlier, with its 2020 anti-waste law introducing extended producer responsibility for clothing on eco-modulated fees, so that producers of less durable garments pay more, alongside a prohibition on destroying unsold stock.
For the first time, a legal instrument is attaching consequences to how long a garment lasts rather than to whose name is on it. Whether these instruments are strong enough is a separate question, and too early to answer. Disclosure regimes assume an informed consumer responding to information, which is a demanding assumption in a market defined by five-dollar impulse purchases. Eco-modulated fees only bite if set high enough to change design decisions. And every one of these instruments is territorial, while the supply chains and the resulting waste are not.
Mourning obituary: what we’re giving up
Two things are true at once, and this piece is not much use if it pretends otherwise. Dupes and cheap fashion are genuinely democratising. Anyone arguing for scarcity should concede that they are arguing, at least partly, for exclusion. But what has been democratised is access to the image, not to the item. You can buy the look of a garment that would have lasted forty years without its ability to sustain those years.
The claim is not that nothing made now will survive. Some of it will, and well-made clothing still gets made. The claim is about proportion: what the next inheriting generation receives will be weighted overwhelmingly toward garments built to a season. The loss is not exclusivity, nor aesthetic purity; it is material continuity. Vintage is its longevity, enough to accumulate a history, to be altered, mended, borrowed, inherited, to end up having significance to individuals and culture. That requires clothes built to outlive a season and a secondhand market that considers the need for development.
We are starting to produce neither, so now, the question worth sitting with is what will our fashion archives amount to when the inheriting generation finds nothing in its predecessors worth inheriting?
References
Rest of World, “How Shein beat Amazon at its own game — and reinvented fast fashion” (2021) — https://restofworld.org/2021/how-shein-beat-amazon-and-reinvented-fast-fashion/
Textile Exchange, Materials Market Report 2025 — https://textileexchange.org/knowledge-center/reports/materials-market-report-2025/
ThredUp, 2026 Resale Report (research by GlobalData) — https://www.thredup.com/resale
Star Athletica, L.L.C. v. Varsity Brands, Inc., 580 U.S. 405 (2017) — https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-866_0971.pdf
Regulation (EU) 2026/715 on European Union designs (codification) — https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2026/715/oj/eng
NPR, “Why Indie Brands Are At War With Shein And Other Fast-Fashion Companies” (20 July 2021) — https://www.npr.org/2021/07/20/1018381462/why-indie-brands-are-at-war-with-shein-and-other-fast-fashion-companies
K Raustiala and C Sprigman, “The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design” (2006) 92 Virginia Law Review 1687 — https://www.virginialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/1687.pdf
Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 (Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation) — https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj
Loi n° 2020-105 du 10 février 2020 relative à la lutte contre le gaspillage et à l’économie circulaire (AGEC) — https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000041553759/
Author: Naomi Ng
Naomi Ng is an LLB (Hons) student at the University of Leeds, with a particular interest in fashion law and intellectual property. Her work examines how legal frameworks shape the fashion industry, and how far its environmental and economic commitments hold up in law.
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