Today, Explained - Mass-produced fashion slop

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

How algorithms and instant fashion killed style — and how to get it back. This episode was produced by Denise Guerra, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. People search for clothes by sorting through piles of second hand textiles displayed on large tables during an Emmaus clearance sale in Poitiers, France. Photo by Jean-François FORT / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images. If you have a question, give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or email [e-mail] to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: ⁠vox.com/members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I was joined by Brian's biographer David Leaf, And we went through what drove Brian, what it was like in the studio during those sessions, and why the pressure of following them up made Brian have to take a step back from music. You can listen to the episode everywhere. You get your podcast by searching for Monday Music Club. As a Genzi person, I think that we grew up pretty concerned about the amount of waste that fast fashion produces. Wholeheartedly reject fast fashion as much as humanly possible and try to shop in person. I had to ask myself, do I actually want these or did Instagram just tell me I do?

You've probably heard of Melrose Avenue. It's an iconic place to go shopping in L.A., and the other day, producer Denise Guerra was there to check out a store called Detour. And let's go. The store's whole deal is that they sell secondhand clothes from influencers. Here is a viral trend right now. Butter yellow, as we know. That's founder Megan Russell. She's filled the place with racks and racks of trendy Instagram-ready clothes.

But she loves a good throwback too. Hannah Montana, Rack? Isn't that kind of crazy? Yeah. Did anyone else wear these in middle school? Because they're back. Looks like a disco ball on pants. Oh, they're rhinestones.

Wow. How much would this retail? Let me check. We probably wrote it. Retail, $630. For sale here, $3.15. This is one of our more expensive items from all ranges,

from Princess Polly, all the way up to luxury. So these are more expensive, but you will definitely find $10 jeans in this rack. The store is brick and mortar, but like a lot of fashion right now, it's shaped by the internet. Consumers follow influencers to dress like them, right? So it's like, why not be able to thrift their closet directly, being able to keep up with trends and also be sustainable and create a solution for influencers to just process through the sheer amount of clothing that they have?

Because when your job is to post a new outfit every single day, you just acquire so much clothing. Some of these girls are dropping off around 10 bags every single month, full of clothes. I'm not an influencer, but even I had a couple bags to purge the last time I cleaned out my closet. And I think that's something that, you know, we kind of need to grapple with as the fashion industry in general. Like, how quickly are these trends changing? And, you know, how does that affect the environment? And, yeah, also, how does that affect the consumer? You know, they're trying to keep up with these trends.

But things are just changing so rapidly. I'm John Glyn Hill. And this week, Unexplained to me from Vox, how algorithms transformed fashion and how we can be the take. I'm Amy O'Dell. I'm a fashion journalist. I write the back row newsletter and I host the back row podcast. Okay, I want to go back in time a little bit. Let's say it's 2007. I'm walking around the mall. I'm looking at the store windows for the latest fashion trend. You know, I'm seeing what's at Forever 21. I'm seeing what's at Charlotte Roos. How did these stores decide what they were going to sell? I think at that time, fashion really trickled down.

more from the runways and tastemakers who were appointed, you know, the Anna Winters of Vogue. You are leading. You are not following. Or John Galliano at Dior. I just made dresses. What's the big deal? Or Carl Lagerfeld at Chanel. Evolution cannot be stopped and will not be stopped tomorrow morning. These styles from these cult of personality designers would end up in the pages of Vogue, and they would trickle down to the...

mall brands or the fashion brands. So taste was really coming from on high, let's say. I think we all know that scene from The Devil Wears Prada. It's seared into like everyone's brain now. It's Miranda Priestley. What you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis.

It's actually cerulean. Explaining how high fashion finds its way into the mainstream. And then Cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. I'm going to filter down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin. Is that still the case today? I think you could argue that it's not the case at all anymore. When that movie was made, we didn't have the internet the way we know it today. We didn't have social media.

We didn't have Instagram. which is crazy to think about. But social media has changed everything. And now what we're seeing is that mall brands, fast fashion brands, maybe there's higher-end brands out there doing this too, they're looking for algorithmic inputs from the internet to figure out what people like and what will sell. And then they're making products that way.

Retailers take fewer risks. Designers are asked to make what the data says people already. The supply chain expert, I see a terrifying industrial evolution. This is not fast fashion. This is real-time fashion. All the brands that you can think of, the nice brands, Zazaara, the Forever 21, the old Polly. Listen, Sheen has them.

Sheen has been a juggernaut in the fast fashion space. And in fact, people call it ultra-fast fashion, or I've also heard it called instant fashion. Why is it called instant fashion? Well, the way it works is they use algorithms to track trends and what people are interested in, and then they make a few hundred of a very large number of different items, and they test demand. And this model allowed them, this is according to the New York Times, to introduce around 4,700 new apparel styles per day. Zara, by comparison, was producing around 20,000.

20,000 a year. Oh my gosh, that's huge. Yeah. Sheehan was revolutionary in pairing technology, you know, with the ability to produce things cheaply, quickly in China. Can you talk a little bit about that algorithmic input a little bit? How do these companies decide what they're going to make and sell to people? That's probably like top secret information that they have are a top secret formula.

But what we do know, and the Wall Street Journal had a really interesting story about this brand addicted, which is sort of like a tween or teen women's clothing brand. And they're looking at, according to the Wall Street Journal, what their customers are searching on the internet, what they're engaging with on social media, and what celebrities like Haley Bieber wear. And their founder said that if she likes something, we make more of it. And we are praying they have the Haley Bieber. I just got the heleneeper gap jeans. Let's see if they're worth the hype.

If she doesn't like something, it goes away. And he said they had already moved on from barrel jeans. Wow. Oh my gosh. Time to throw my pants away? Question mark, question mark. I know. It's crazy because I just started getting barrel jeans myself.

Something that comes up time and time again when we talk about technology, when we talk about the internet, is the shittification. You know, things become slop. Have we seen that in fashion as well? And what does that look like? I think we are seeing it in fashion. You know, Sheehan might tell you a top for five bucks, or they used to, pre-tariffs or a dress for 10 bucks. And these pieces are not designed to be worn for very long.

You could order something from there, and that shit will be paper thin. I was wearing a pair of sheen shorts to the gym, and guess what? The crotch split open, mid-workout. And they're so cheap that you just go and you replenish and you buy more. That to me, I think, is fashion slop. However, I also want to acknowledge that a lot of people are not shopping at Sheehan because they're pro-slop. A lot of people are shopping at these fast fashion brands or these ultra-fast fashion brands because that's what they can afford. I don't care what anyone says.

I will continue shopping at Sheen and Timu, especially if I can get $50 worth of outfits. I wasn't making that much money. So guess what I did, gang? I went where I could afford. There are just so many options. options. How do you make sense of it all? I find shopping to be kind of less pleasant than ever before, maybe precisely for that reason. I don't particularly enjoy the process of shopping online and sifting and, you know, you search something in Google and it's going to give you sponsored results or

even if you search something, you know, wherever you shop. Like, how do you know that you're getting the best thing for you? You know what I mean? So I think that it's, it's overwhelming to shop nowadays. I wonder this mass production, this kind of everything goes, is that promoting more personal style because kind of everything is out there? Or are we seeing less personal style because algorithms are kind of telling us what to wear and providing what we wear? I would say probably more. I just think it's, you know, there's so many options available for people when it comes

to clothing and accessories. and I think people can be really created in a way that they probably couldn't be as creative when they didn't have as many options when I'm a millennial too and we were teens or tweens and we were going to the mall and that was kind of our set of options

was what was available to us in the mall. Now there's just so many more options. In some ways, I feel like fast fashion has made dressing originally harder but I actually think that on Instagram it's much easier to find small. designers and fashion inspiration from creators who are wearing just really niche brands and original combinations and making a lot of their own stuff. And so I actually feel like I'm

seeing people in my life dressing more and more individually. People are really savvy about fashion now. They know, you know, in more detail, how their clothes are made. They know about different designers and, you know, different vintage trends. and different vintage looks that were significant in their day. So I think that the Internet has really opened up kind of a world of possibilities for creative expression, I guess, when it comes to getting dressed. That particular brand of fashion savvy may feel new, but it's actually a return to our old ways.

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My name's Avery Treffleman and I make a podcast about fashion called Articles of Interest. Avery knows all about the history of why we wear what we wear and how it got made. Our clothes are mostly mass-produced now, but that was not the case in the 19th century. For the most part, you are buying cloth. You go and you buy pieces of cloth at a market, and then you bring them to a tailor or you sew them yourself, and that's how you get clothes. Initially, there were no women's clothes ready-made. And this is part of where, um, It became this very feminized activity to read the fashion plates and keep up with fashion because you had to sew your own stuff. You'd be like, what's everybody wearing? What's going on? What's a fashion plate?

It's like an early pressing of like, here's what the styles are, usually from France. But yeah, it's this idea of like they're not ready made clothes for you. You got to figure it out yourself. You got to figure out what everybody else is doing and either instruct your seamstress or make it or, you know, later on in the 20th century, a pattern, go to Paris. Some people like to trace this all the way back to the court of Louis XIV in France and how he dictated consistent changes of the seasons, of fashion seasons,

in order to support the French silk industry. And he would intentionally change the colors and change the patterns so he could tell who was buying and who was supporting the silk makers in Leone and who wasn't. It was a very shrewd move. One, to support domestic industry.

Two, it was considered a bit of a strategic move to maintain his court because he was like, if everyone's so worried about how they're dressing, no one's going to come from my throne. And it was like an ultimate form of distraction. So that's the very, very root of it. That's the very root of like why France is fashion capital

and why there are these consistent season changes is because the government of France has long invested in their fashion industry. That is wild. Use the changing of the seasons intentionally. It really wasn't until, I would say, mid-1800s, that it becomes to be a more widespread practice that you buy clothes that have already been made. Okay, so at this point, Paris was very much the center of the universe for fashion, and, you know, it still kind of is.

Did ready-made clothes change that at all? This is a very American phenomenon. Because it was this idea that in this ostensibly democratic experiment, we're all supposed to, we all, meaning like white men, are all supposed to dress equally. It's like this amazing new opportunity where, you know, back in Europe, the kings wore jewels and the beggars wore rags, but not this new democratic experiment,

The statesman is going to dress the same as the merchant is going to dress the same as, and this was a source of real moral panic, like maybe even the common criminal. Like anyone could kind of wear a suit. And you didn't really know who is who or what their background is. It created a lot of anxiety, but it was also this idea of a fresh start. And when you think about it, this sort of invents the practice of shopping. And it should be clear that, like, you were probably only doing this if you, you were probably only doing this. you were a white man, which explains a lot. Shopping used to be considered a very masculine activity because they're like, I don't have time to sew.

I don't have time to go to the tailor. I'm thinking about important things. I'm buying my clothes ready-made. Where were they going to buy those ready-made clothes? Brooks Brothers is always the company that I go back to. They didn't invent ready-made clothes, but they were really on the vanguard of it, and they're still around, which is, incredible. And initially

ready-made clothes were considered sort of lower class, and then they opened a store in midtown, and it happened very slowly that, okay, then it was upper-class men, then they started making, eventually they started making clothes for women, this idea of mass-produced clothing as reputable fashion, as something that can compete with, you know, a couture house in Europe. That's been growing extremely slowly over time.

That growth sped up around the time a lot of American innovation did. World War II. France was occupied by the Nazis, and Avery says that, along with the boom in labor here at home, give the U.S. what it needed to make its own mark on clothing. The ready-to-wear fashion industry is very American. Like, we made that. And a big part of why is because we had a lot of labor. We had a lot of immigrants. We had a lot of, like, women working at home who were very easily exploited. And we lost, not entirely, there still are some garments made in America,

but by and large, we lost our manufacturing capacity somewhat intentionally during the Cold War as a way to fight communism. And then later in the 1970s, we were encouraged to support the foreign markets in China and to prop them up to support capitalism. You know, a factory is just a bunch of sewing machines and poorly paid workers. It's very easy to set up. And Avery says that kind of production led to the fast fashion empires we have now.

It's very hard to just buy good quality clothes at a decent price. A lot of these manufacturers, especially abroad, have minimums. Like, they need to. They're like, if you want us to make this shirt, you have to order 100,000 of this shirt, like huge numbers. And so it's more expensive for smaller brands to make smaller quantities, which is why these like smaller brands end up being so expensive. And so now I think a lot of people looking to buy clothes are left with the choice of like, do I want cheap slop or very expensive nice clothes?

It's very hard to find something in the middle. sometimes I'll just walk down the street and in a crowded thoroughfare and be like, look at all these clothing stores. They're packed. Racks and racks and racks and racks and racks and racks. And like, who's going to buy them all? Where are they all going? And it is really all to feed our voracious desire for novelty and variety. But it's hard because I don't want to just blame the consumer.

I don't want to be like, it's our fault. We have to stop shopping. It's just the way that these systems have developed, making mass quantities of already made clothes in any color, any size, any fit you can imagine, on like many floors of many buildings. It's the nature of capitalism. It's just supposed to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow. One place those mass-produced clothes end up,

on the racks of your local resale shop. That's coming up. Support for TakeSwin comes from talkiatry. When you are struggling with your mental health, the last thing you want to deal with is a complicated search to find the help you need. Tokayatri makes it easy to see a licensed psychiatrist online who takes your insurance in just a few days.

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It's the place you go for clothes when you're on a budget, or if you want to find something you can't get anywhere else. For the last sort of probably a hundred years, actually, it has had lots of moments where it's been cool within countercultures. That's Hannah Myriad. She's a former fashion editor at The Guardian.

I think it's because people within countercultures, whether it's grunge or the surrealists in the 1920s or like the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, secondhand clothing was cool kind of because of the stigma. The stigma of being poor. I really think that had changed a lot

recently. I think it was a gradual shift anyway, but I think it was very accelerated by various sort of things that happened in the pandemic, including just this absolute sort of influx of apps that had been around for a while, but got very, very popular during that time, particularly among younger Gen Z consumers who, again, were looking for that sort of individuality. Screen time on these apps sort of rocketed. Thrifting became a bit of a sort of social currency on social media platforms, especially on TikTok. Yo, I'm literally shaking, bro. I just had my craziest thrift all of all time. The reason you can't find anything at a thrift store is because you don't know how to

thrift. But yeah, it's an absolutely vast ecosystem at the moment. No one else does it like the real real. Thousands of new arrivals daily. She just discovered the sweet sound of earning and saving money on vintage. Sell your clothes with no selling fees on Deepop. Buy what you love with the extra cash. All of them have slightly different business models, slightly different sort of fees that they charge and so on,

and slightly different audiences that they're reaching. I think the sort of, the fact that thrifting could be cool, that you could find individual pieces and so on, became much more mainstream as an idea during that time. And I think the stigma has really gone away and it's almost like reversed. One of the biggest secondhand shops here in the US is still Goodwill. Goodwill has a large selection of blue jeans, denim shirts, denim jackets.

You'll also find great buys on T-shirt. And when you shop your Goodwill retail store, you support employment and training programs for people with barriers to employment. Can you walk me through how Goodwill has adapted and changed to the secondhand boom? Yeah, that's incredibly interesting as well because I think neighborhood thrift stores of that kind are the sort of stores that. that people on lower income do rely on more. It's somewhere that people have often been going for decades to get clothes that they can afford. But a lot of shoppers feel strongly that they've gone up like a lot,

that you can't find bugs anymore, that the bargains get sent online to either their website or are bought by resellers who sell them for an inflated price online. I think it's quite hard to get to the bottom of exactly how to do all of that is, especially because Goodwill is run as sort of like, I think it's like 150 autonomous sort of, sort of like franchises and each of them set their own prices. But what I would say is you are seeing things like the Goodwill branch in Connecticut is running this sort of thrift tour where they're charging 75 bucks to go on a coach.

Goodwill has some bargains, you're going to get a deal. sign up for the next bus trip you'll even get a meal and you get like early access to a Goodwill store and then you get to go to another but it's like you know you used to be able to buy like 10 things in Goodwill for 75 bucks so

Yeah I you know I think Back to college and there's this Thrift store it's no longer with us People would go to Georgia AF Thrift And a lot of folks would be like Okay I'm in college I have $15 I need blazers for these internships.

Or, you know, you always hear, hey, go to the goodwill in the rich neighborhoods because that's where they're dropping off their designer stuff. But this is sounding like a real barrier to the people who need the secondhand market. Like, what's up with that? So I think that is quite sort of coordinated by management. There's Google Lens now. So you can just take a picture of a shoe. And then, you know, then people working in the store might see that it's on D-POP for 50 bucks, let's say. So they put it on for 50 bucks.

It could be on, I think that's one of the differences between like the Goodwill model and online, is that online is a bit of a waiting game. I think people expect to have their products on the website for months, and they might have to reprise them three times. It's a sort of a long-term kind of situation, whereas you would expect, the products in Goodwill to be priced to move because it is a physical location that's getting a lot of donations. But it sounds like there has been quite a lot of pressure in certain of the branches to match the prices to the online prices. And yeah, I do think people get left out

people who are already worried about money at the moment. It's so interesting that thrifting used to be this edgy, original thing where you find bargains. You find things that other people don't have. But it's really gone mainstream. Like, has it sold out? Has it gone the way of fashion trends before it? Has it gone the way of like punk rock where it's a little mainstream

and people are like, it's not what it used to be? You know, I remember, you know, when I was much younger, people would say, oh, you got that second hand. Oh, you know, and I just don't think anyone would ever say that now because that's kind of how we shop. But I still think it is great if you find something original that you love that no one else has.

And I still think you're more likely to find it secondhand. Or actually in certain other under the radar brands than you are in fast fashion. And I think maybe this is a bit of a reaction to sort of, it's been probably like what, 30 years of fast fashion just getting faster and faster and faster. And I think we're all feeling a bit tired of that sort of business. model, so we're trying to find other ways to shop and express ourselves. That's it for this week. Before we go, we want your help with an upcoming episode. The longevity movement is almost inescapable. We're constantly being told to optimize. Now that message is moving

below the bell. We want to know. What messages have you seen lately about reproductive health? Are you having any trouble separating the science from the snake oil? Give us a the call at 1-800-618-8-55 or email AskVox at Vox.com. If you enjoy listening to this podcast, consider becoming a Vox member. It comes with its perks, including ad-free versions of this and other Vox podcasts. Check out Vox.com slash members to learn more. This episode was produced by Denise Guerra. It was edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by David Tattachor,

our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and I'm your host, John Gulen Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.