Shein may be popular among Gen-Z shoppers, but when the ultra-fast fashion brand offered scholarships to the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, the students protested

Shein is in the news again. Prior to US media reports that American politicians have jointly sent a letter to the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, expressing serious disquiet over the Singapore-headquartered Chinese brand’s plan to file an IPO in the US, concerns about Shein’s business practices were also conveyed on the academic front. According to American press reports, Shein has offered scholarships to the students of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) in Los Angeles, California. The school’s acceptance of Shein’s largesse—US$40,000 per beneficiary, according to FIDM’s website)—appears to be a walk-away from its enthusiastic sustainable-fashion positioning.

The students are, however, not buying the brand’s financial overtures, first announced last May. One of them told Vogue Business: “How can a school that has been named and promotes itself as one of the top 10 most sustainable fashion schools in the world, then partner with a company that is potentially the biggest fast fashion polluter on the planet?” Undaunted, she took to change.org to petition for FIDM—Singapore Stories 2020 winner and now designer-in-haitus Carol Chen’s alma mater (although the satellite campus in San Francisco where she attended school has closed due to financial stress)—to reject the Shein scholarship. More than 4,300 signatures were gathered. That, reportedly, exceeds twice the size of FIDM’s student body!

But the scholarship may be appealing to some. Offered as part of the Shein X program, students who qualify (there are twelve of them) get “the opportunity to create a 5 to 10-piece collection to be sold on Shein’s platform”, according to a statement by the school. That could mean they will produce and sell the students’ designs. The Chinese brand’s U.S. head of strategy and corporate affairs Peter Pernot-Day told Vogue Business that he thinks the protest is “based on some misperceptions about our business model”. He did not elaborate on what that business model is or how the graduate pieces of the 12 students will be produced, and where. It isn’t known if the students’ rejection of Shein’s generous scholarship is in reaction to what could happen to those who blindly align themselves with the brand without asking the right questions, as a bunch of influencers found out to serious public backlash last June. Shein shouldn’t be surprised that the students were not more gullible than social media influencers.

Illustration: Just So