Cheap Is the Most Expensive Thing You Can Buy
By Danielle Franz
Open TikTok on any given evening and you’ll find them: girls hauling forty pieces of clothing onto a bedroom floor, holding up $9 dresses and $4 bikinis, narrating the spoils of a Shein order shipped halfway around the world for less than a Starbucks order. The comments are full of envy. The clothes are full of toxins.
Year after year, the vast majority of Shein items tested have failed European safety screenings for hazardous substances. Their baby’s clothes have come back positive for lead. Their children’s pajamas have been recalled for catching fire. Texas has sued, citing both the contaminants and the company’s Chinese Communist Party ties. And these are the clothes sitting in millions of American closets right now.
The Make America Healthy Again movement has interrogated what we put in our bodies: seed oils, dyes, synthetic additives buried in every aisle of the grocery store. Good. But our skin is the largest organ we have, and it is in constant, intimate contact with whatever we wear. If you care that there’s Red 40 in your kid’s cereal, you should care that there’s lead in his pajamas.
For years, critics of fast fashion—including me—have focused on the environmental and labor dimensions. Shein has been called the single biggest polluter in the history of fashion. Its supply chain runs on what looks an awful lot like forced labor. These charges remain real and damning. But the health story is the one that should finally close the case, because it implicates every American who has ever clicked “add to cart” thinking they’d found a deal.
They hadn’t. A $9 shirt looks like a wonder of capitalism. It’s an exchange. The buyer trades a measure of long-term health for an aesthetic that lasts about as long as the trending sound the haul video was filmed to. The shirt is cheap because someone, somewhere, paid the difference. Often, a child.
We’ve already made nearly every argument against Shein. On one side, the right has critiqued haul videos as a moral and spiritual symptom: vanity, gluttony, the formation of young women by an algorithm that does not love them. Conservatives have pointed to questionable Chinese supply chains as the slow death of American manufacturing, with textile towns hollowed out and family workshops shuttered while a Chinese giant becomes the largest clothing retailer on earth.
The left, meanwhile, has critiqued the human rights abuses, the carbon cost, the pollution, the Bangladeshi factories. Both critiques are correct, and neither has worked. Shein dominates.
Pick a side. It doesn’t matter. The clothes are still toxic, the children wearing them are ours, and no political tradition in this country has ever been comfortable poisoning its own kids.
So return to basics. Wool that breathes. Cotton that absorbs. Linen that wrinkles because it’s alive. Buy fewer pieces and pay more for them, recover in health what you spend in dollars. Teach your daughter that a haul video is not a personality. Teach your son that the tag inside his shirt matters more than the logo on the front. Making America healthy again begins at the table, but it does not end there. It runs through every drawer, closet, load of laundry—and eventually, every parent who decides that cheap is the most expensive thing they can buy.
Danielle Franz is the chief executive officer at the American Conservation Coalition (ACC). She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and young son. Follow her on X @DanielleBFranz.
