From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, August 23
BBC News — read the full story
What happens when a company built on abundance — infinite choice, impossible prices — asks the market to bet on its permanence? Shein's heading to Hong Kong's exchange at nearly twenty-seven billion dollars, the fast-fashion disruptor that turned garment-making into a velocity problem now asking if Wall Street believes the model holds. The timing matters: this I.P.O. lands while labor practices and waste sit under permanent spotlight, testing whether scale and speed can outrun scrutiny. Benjamin Franklin has the first word on this, then Henry David Thoreau.
I walked into the London Coffee House one rain-slick morning in '73 and found a knot of merchants bidding up shares in a canal scheme before the first spade had broken ground. The prospectus promised ten percent; the reality delivered a ditch half-dug and a dozen ruined subscribers. We have seen this comedy before , the same actors, new costumes. The clothiers writing to me from Carcassonne and Saint-Pol knew the game: sell the wholesale lot to the factor, let him carry the risk of fashion's turn, collect your coin before the season breaks.
This Shein concern — twenty-seven thousand million dollars, they say, for shirts that unravel before the wash-water cools — has merely compressed the factor's margin into a algorithm. The needle moves faster; the principle is unchanged. Lynen's brass mill in the passages supplied rods for the Guinea trade alongside his nesting kettles. Profit seldom asks the purpose of the wire it draws.
A young printer once asked me whether he should borrow to buy a second press. I told him: borrow for the press that prints the almanack, not the one that prints the lottery tickets. The distinction escapes most subscribers. They see the dividend and call it wisdom.
The ledger balances in the end. It always does.
but it is a secret sale, and has greatly chagrind the Merchants here, who think the best Bidder ought to have it at an open sale. They say 15 Sous woud have been given for it. Mr. Morris has not yet explaind this business to me. I hope to be at Bordeaux four days hence. I have th…
<Carcassonne, May 17, 1777, in French: I manufacture textiles and blankets suitable for America. A number of French dealers have asked for them and, I know, sold them profitably to the Americans, whom I should like to see profiting directly from my inexpensive goods. My offer wou…
is recognized throughout Europe, he explains, merchants and manufacturers are vying for new outlets. Lynen’s brass mill produces all kinds of goods, among them nesting kettles, casseroles, basins, plates, wire of various gauges, needles, and brass rods for the slave trade. His fi…
<Amsterdam, August 26, 1779: The articles in question, to be purchased in Holland and delivered to Nantes by La Ville de Bordeaux, Capt. Claas, are thirteen in number. Eleven of them call for pharmaceuticals, two for textiles. The pharmaceuticals comprise large quantities of hipo…
Le Comte De Vergennes. Notations: M de Rayneval / M. francklin / rep le 6 may. The following Articles are wanted for the State of Maryland. viz. 10,000 Stand of Arms compleat, including Cartridge Boxes, &ca. 10. Brass Field Pieces, of 4 & 6 lb Ball with their Carriages and Harnes…
The pickerel-weed blooms purple in the shallows where I waded this morning. It asks no valuation. It has no shareholders. A company called Shein prepares to sell itself for twenty-seven thousand million dollars. The number stuns. It means investors believe they can extract that much life from the seamstress bent over her machine in a factory she will never name, from the cotton field drained of water, from the dyer's vat turning the river a color no pickerel-weed would choose, from the child who outgrows the shirt in a season, from the landfill that receives it still smelling of chemical finish.
I have seen the mill girls in Lowell cough at their looms. I have watched the cloth come off the beam. The price on the tag never accounts for the breath shortened or the silt settled. Commerce calls this efficiency. It calls it disruption. It means only that the cost has been shifted onto those who cannot read the prospectus.
The pine hewn on northern hills once flew through the township in ten minutes , scarce another eye beheld it. Now the garment flies faster. The valuation rises. The ground does not change. Twenty-seven billion dollars. The pickerel-weed does not know the number.
The river does not care. I put on my patched coat and walk home.
place in the universe. Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success. I am refreshed and expanded …
new passages and all improvements in navigation;—charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should…
directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Vermont, some trader among the Green Mountains, who imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulk-head and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him, telling his custo…
purpose, and so I soon cooked my supper of rice, having already whittled a wooden spoon to eat it with. I sat up during the evening, reading by the light of the fire the scraps of newspapers in which some party had wrapped their luncheon; the prices current in New York and Boston…
vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their ma…
B.B.C. News carried this piece. Shein's $27 billion Hong Kong listing begins September 1 — a bet that the fast-fashion velocity model survives public-market scrutiny over labor and waste. That's Old News for today.