If the deal seems too good to be true, it likely is. That was the subtext of Saturday Night Live’s bogus ad for “Xiemu,” the latest fast fashion hitmaker from China.
Parodying the meteoric rise of e-commerce phenoms Shein and Temu, models pranced across the screen in $10 dresses and $5 shoes as a voiceover proclaimed, “How so cheap? Don’t worry about it!”
“No prisoners involved!”
“Normal number of working hours each week!”
“No lead!”
SNL’s latest skit playfully and adeptly made light of the dubious circumstances surrounding offshore apparel juggernauts’ ultra-fast supply chains and impossibly low MSRPs. It also highlighted the slick advertising tactics firms have employed in order to pull the wool (or more likely, polyester) over the eyes of trend-obsessed, discount-hungry American shoppers.
“I laughed! I cried! But mostly I was impressed at how SNL so deftly encapsulated the psychological phenomenon of ‘willful ignorance,’ where consumers literally don’t worry about things they don’t want to know about, especially if it gets in the way of looking cute,” said Sourcing Journal sourcing and labor editor Jasmin Malik-Chua.
Featuring SNL host and Oscar-winning actor Jake Gyllenhaal, the skit “illuminated the breadth of the problems related to certain Chinese e-commerce companies that have been linked to forced labor in their supply chains,” said National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO) president and CEO Kim Glas.
NCTO, along with other industry trade groups and lawmakers, has long lobbied against fast-fashion players’ unbridled access to U.S. shoppers. They’ve “aggressively” employed the de minimis trade provision “to ship undervalued and largely uninspected products to the U.S. market,” Glas said.
“The skit highlighted the ramifications of these practices for consumers who unknowingly purchase toxic products or products made with slave labor,” she added. At one point in the faux ad, Gyllenhaal incurs a nosebleed after sniffing his supposedly lead-free button down—a nod to the fact that many shoppers are largely uninformed about both the origins and the content of the products they buy.
“Our outdated trade provisions reward companies like ‘Shemu’ with duty-free treatment on millions of shipments a day… simply by shipping something in a small box through the international mail,” Glas said. “The de minimis provision hurts the U.S. textile industry and our regional trade partners—devastating businesses that play by the rules and undermining all trade enforcement of forced labor and other abuses,” she added.
“Don’t worry about it!” is the Xiemu ad’s refrain. But according to Glas, “We need to worry about it, and we need to close this loophole now.”
The main driver of fashion’s ever-increasing environmental and social impact is the sheer volume of apparel produced globally, and it’s “abundantly clear that the Sheins and Temus of the world value growth over all else,” Remake senior advocacy manager Alexa Roccanova told Sourcing Journal.
But it’s not just lawmakers that need to take action.
“The skit hones in on a very sad reality that despite the many pervasive issues that have been exposed in the fashion industry, from blatant human rights violations to chemical exposure, there are still many who are apathetic toward these truths,” Roccanova said. “The continued sales growth of fast fashion giants like Shein and Temu are evidence of this.”
The “ad” takes aim at this consumer apathy when the voiceover asks the increasingly sketched-out shoppers—who begin to catch onto the themes of forced labor and quality issues—whether they’d stop buying from “Xiemu” if they knew for sure that production practices were indeed “shady.” The answer is a resounding “No.”
Roccanova is a bit more optimistic about the potential for a sea-change, though. “Fortunately, we’re also seeing a fast-growing movement of conscious consumers and advocates who are quick to spot greenwashing efforts, call out fashion companies implicated in egregious environmental and labor rights violations, and advocate for a better industry,” she said.
“Customers want the brands they shop from to do better and know that they have the resources to do so, but at the end of the day, fast fashion as a business model is inherently unsustainable.”
Maxine Bedat, executive director of the New Standard Institute, said the skit, while silly on the surface, actually highlights “the question of our time.”
“The SNL sketch was a funny take on an issue that is clearly concerning the average American,” she explained. “The industry needs to look at itself in the mirror and ask, ‘Is this the direction we want to go?’”
Or, Bedat posits, “Are we going to start putting in some common sense rules, with legitimate consequences, so that consumers can have trust in this industry, and we can build a sector that can thrive for generations to come?”