3 - China-Africa cross-platform creativity in the fashion industry: a case study of Shein products made in China and consumed in Kenya

Shein is a unicorn fast-fashion platform in China. Founded in 2008 and emerging during COVID, the company was estimated to be worth $100 billion in 2022 —more than its fast-fashion predecessors and competitors H&M and Zara combined. Awed for its productions at an unprecedented rapid pace with affordable prices or condemned over its labor exploitation and potentially catastrophic impacts on the environment, this Chinese company has been largely considered by media, business analysts, and environmentalists yet another embodiment of “Made in China,” which often implies cheap, poor quality, tacky.
However, based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in China and Kenya, this paper shows how Shein’s products were perceived as fashionable in the Kenyan market. Not only, according to one of our Kenyan interlocutors, this was the first time that made-in-China garments and accessories were appreciated as branded with a certain level of symbolic and aesthetic value, but also, the affordability combined with fashionability of Shein’s products brought an alternative choice to the local grassroots fashion consumption, which was previously dominated by purchasing second-hand fast-fashion products from the global North. More importantly, the paper will map how this fashionability was constituted along the “global South value chain” with the support from the evolving China-Africa digital infrastructure that the creative practices and value-adding processes were cross-platform and contributed by various actors/actants, instead of solely by Shein. So, with this case, the paper provides an alternative way of creativity in the fashion industry between two global South economies.