Everlane was never your friend

Last Sunday, Puck published the news that Everlane, the fashion brand whose simplicity and timelessness defined conscious consumerism of the 2010s, was selling to fast-fashion behemoth Shein. The response was an immediate, shocked and disbelieving glut of teary Instagram reels and Reddit conversations. By Monday, mournful obituaries from the likes of CNN, Fast Company, The Cut and others blanketed the internet.

Neither Everlane nor Shein have confirmed the sale, but the overwhelming emotion from customers, designers, and members of the fashion community that greeted the announcement offered confirmation of a different sort: namely, that the spirit of the 2010s, an era that saw direct-to-consumer brands making their names on core values of ethics and sustainability, has until very recently lived on in shoppers who want to believe that conscious consumerism could thrive despite all evidence to the contrary.

The idea of a clothing brand built on the principles of fair labor and lasting quality selling to another that’s synonymous with theft, worker exploitation, and environmental waste, hit hard. “This is a total assault on the integrity of what this brand stood for,” Fashion Institute of Technology professor Shawn Grain Carter told CNN. On Instagram, A Jar of Pickles owner Kirstie Wang tearfully expressed her disappointment that a brand so influential on her own career trajectory was capitulating to one that’s stolen her own designs, along with those of many other small businesses.

There was a time when a multinational brand making explicitly values-based overtures to potential customers would have been considered bizarre. But Everlane was one of the first of what became an influx of mission-driven, direct-to-consumer brands that sought to redefine commerce at the start of the 2010s. The value proposition of Warby Parker, Allbirds, Casper and others was that selling directly to consumers not only allowed them to offer significantly lower prices, but the sense that customers were doing business not with a faceless chain but with a like-minded community.

Everlane’s business model was based on what it called “radical transparency” — a commitment to giving customers hard numbers and insight into its supply chain. Each garment, shoe or bag sold on its site came with a thorough explanation of how it got there: where the cotton or linen or leather was sourced, the wholesale versus retail costs, the environmental impact of creating it, and the amount customers saved without the markup of a brick-and-mortar boutique or department store. Everlane sold quality merchandise in natural materials and understated colors but, perhaps more importantly, it let them feel good about their purchases.

In 2010, when Everlane launched, this felt like a necessary corrective. The global spread of fast fashion chains like H&M, Zara and Forever 21 coincided with two inflection points in American consumerism: The post-9/11 insistence from then-president George W. Bush that shopping was a patriotic duty; and a newly thriving set of glossy tabloid magazines like Us Weekly and Star that gushed over aspirational celebrity style and nudged readers toward cheap, trend-responsive approximations of the hottest looks.

In contrast, the market crash of 2008 was a wake-up call. The label-consciousness of the boom years suddenly seemed like a symptom of the same careless greed that led to the housing bubble and the banking crisis. The Great Recession had a kind of hangover effect on fashion: Where were we going to wear all this fancy stuff anyway? How many going-out tops does a person really need? Why had we been convinced to take fashion cues from the Hollywood elite?

In the post-crash vibe shift, even fashion insiders called for a reset. Vogue fashion director Tonne Goodman, who later became the magazine’s first ever sustainability editor, began running a monthly column called “Style Ethics.” References to a slow-fashion movement that centered environmental consciousness, fair labor practices, and simply buying less crept into the discourse, and media alternatives like Canada’s WORN Fashion Journal, launched in 2004 and YouTube upcycling influencers began seeming more relevant than tabloid glossies.

Everlane’s hybridity — its founder saw it as a tech company as much as a fashion retailer —  and its mission of radical transparency set a template for other direct-to-consumer brands of the era. Non-DTC brands and projects also clocked the growing desire among consumers to seek out businesses that felt like they actually cared what their customer wanted. The Millennial founders of buzzy companies like Glossier, Nasty Gal, WeWork and others were charismatic paradigm-shifters whose own personalities and ideals became in many ways indistinguishable from their brands.

Young women founders in particular — among them Nasty Gal’s Sophia Amoruso, Glossier’s Emily Weiss, Thinx’s Miki Agrawal, Away’s Steph Korey and The Wing’s Audrey Gelman — emerged at a time when feminism was becoming as much a market category as it was a social and political movement. The retail transference that turned, say, a pink suitcase into a feminist statement worked to turn brands into fandoms. Like sports fans painting their faces and torsos in team colors, brand loyalty became brand identification.

For the most part, it didn’t take long for the facades of mission-driven retail to start crumbling. The reputations of brands built on feminist girlbossery — Nasty Gal, Thinx, The Wing and Away, amog others — took major damage when employees realized that mediagenic founders declaring that the future was female didn’t necessarily translate into inspiring workplace cultures or family-friendly policies. Similarly, Everlane’s veneer of social responsibility and equitable business practices started wearing away when members of the company’s part-time, remote customer experience team began to consider unionizing and Everlane’s top executives, including its “head of people,” responded with passive-aggressive emails suggesting they rethink. Shortly afterward, two-thirds of the customer experience workers were laid off, along with more than 100 other employees.

Then, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police in May 2020, Everlane was among a group of brands — including Ban.do, Outside Voices, Refinery29 and Reformation — whose somber social-media posts acknowledging the injustice prompted ex-employees to put the companies’ business practices and institutional cultures on blast. The range of micro- and macroaggressions detailed in a public statement included “anti-Black behavior, prejudice in advancement of Black and POC employees, bullying, racial and heteronormative supremacy, manipulation and the intimidation of employees who have attempted to address these issues.”

Amanda Lee McCarty, whose podcast “Clotheshorse” explores of how the fast-fashion sausage gets made and why it matters, thought that that would be it — “like, Okay we all agree that Everlane is not what we thought it was.” Instead, company founder Michael Preysman quietly stepped down and private-equity firm L Catterton stepped in, becoming the majority stakeholder by 2024. The fact that few Everlane customers followed the details of its ownership, McCarty thinks, is what makes the sale to Shein feel like a sudden ideological abandonment rather than the foreseeable result of a private-equity takeover.

Well, that and the fact that one of Shein’s defining features is an apparent pride in being fast fashion’s Big Bad. In the past half-decade, the world’s biggest fashion retailer has become equally famous for unethical business practices that it does nothing to conceal. The conscious image that Everlane sold consumers is one that Shein seems to revel in flouting: Yeah, we’re using sweatshops and child labor, what about it? Yeah, we’re stealing designs from small labels — too bad for them. Yeah, we’re polluting the earth, and guess what? You can’t stop us.

The fact that a long-planned IPO hasn’t yet materialized could explain the company’s desire to buy itself an imprimatur of sustainablity like Everlane, says McCarty. “Investors are concerned about legal and regulatory issues with the brand. Without that IPO, [Shein’s] hit the ceiling in what it can do, and that might be forcing a re-evaluation.” Buying a brand that has better optics, McCarty thinks, “could make some of these investors less squeamish.”

There’s a kind of relief, in fact, amid the shock and disappointment churning online since the news broke: The mask has finally, irrevocably slipped. The brand-as-friend charade can be retired. Loyalists no longer have to memory-hole the company’s union busting or shrug off the racism of its corporate culture or wonder why the jeans they bought a decade ago hold up so much better than the ones they bought last year. There’s no more room for magical thinking — Allbirds, after all, just last month announced it was out of the sneaker game and, after its value cratered, is now an AI company.

Writer, stylist and sustainability consultant Aja Barber, for one, wasn’t surprised by the news: “Everlane, for me, always gave tech-bro vibes. After a few releases I stopped buying into the idea that they cared about sustainability at all — it became clear to me in how they marketed themselves and [in] some of their less thoughtful decisions like opening a brick-and-mortar store in the rapidly gentrifying Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. People who actually care about ethical fashion don’t move this way.”

“It’s a great case study of our relationships with brands,” agrees McCarty. “If you really wanted to know if Everlane was sustainable and ethical, all it would take is 15 seconds [on the] internet. But I saw a whole conversation on Reddit where Everlane fans were saying that perhaps what drove the company to sell to Shein was that they have all this debt created by trying to be sustainable. I mean, the coping!”

Elizabeth Cline, author of the 2012 book “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Fast Fashion,” wrote in The Atlantic last week that “The Everlane playbook lulled many shoppers into thinking the market was fixing itself, and turned sustainability into a niche consumer product for those who could afford it … the half truths and performative claims from the larger fashion industry may have ultimately crushed a lot of people’s faith that the field can do better.” But should the takeaway be that any brand that claims to center ethics or sustainability is faking the funk?

McCarty doesn’t think so, but emphasizes that the best route for a brand trying to live its values requires thinking small — something that has become antithetical to the American conception of success. “You can run an ethical and sustainable business and create really good jobs for people and make great products,” McCarty says. “But it’s not going to make you a billionaire.”

Consumers, meanwhile, are still seeking connections with brands — perhaps for different reasons than they once did.

“People want to form bonds with brands because [they] feel so disempowered by our society,” says Barber. “Failing social safety nets. An inability to save money or buy a house. Crippling debt. So really, folks feel like the only thing they can do is buy stuff.”