Oh No, You Got Clothing Catfished
How to avoid junk fashion websites that sell you garbage.
In the middle of my week-long visit to my mom’s place, I was working at the kitchen table when she asked me, “Have you heard of SooLinen?”
“No. But that sounds like a Chinese website.”
I wandered over to the couch where she was sitting with her iPad, and leaned over to look. “Oh yeah, that’s a junk website,” I told her.
“How do you know?”
“I can just tell.”
At this point, I can just tell. There’s something about the design of these websites that tells me it’s garbage. But put on the spot, I had to point to some actual evidence, especially since she had ordered some earrings already. I needed to save her from more bad choices.
Those earrings would probably be fine — it’s easier to mass-produce ultra-cheap costume jewelry than clothing. (Though, those earrings probably won’t show up for a couple of weeks.) But I wanted to save her from wasting her money on something of true garbage quality.
You probably have experienced one of these online retail sites at least once. They send awful, toxic, ill-fitting, cheap, synthetic product. And when you try to return it, they don’t respond. Then that product goes in the garbage. You don’t want that.
This hasn’t just happened to my mom. My cousin ordered a boho dress and told me it was a polyester monstrosity that looked nothing like the dress on the website. My friend, having reached peak revenge body during her divorce, ordered some sexy lingerie and said it was the most unflattering thing she had ever tried on. My other friend was getting married to her Vietnamese husband and ordered a traditional dress for herself and a jacket for him. They were hilariously bad.
I call this clothing catfishing. You fall in love with a gorgeous garment, and turns out it was a scam to take your money.
In the pantheon of scams, this isn’t the worst. (Except if you were relying on it for an important event.) I’m more worried about my mom sending her life savings to an AI-generated me who has been kidnapped and held for ransom. (I’ve told her if I ever call her in a crisis asking for money, to text my number and ask if I’m okay.)
But, clothing catfishing is still a waste of money, completely unsustainable, and a safety issue. As I’ve said many times before, ultra-fast fashion brands make ultra-toxic clothing.
Even the most blasé large American brands will require their orders to be tested by a third party for certain things like lead, pH, and restricted azo dyes that can cause skin reactions. These “brands”, on the other hand, don’t care about their reputation; they just order product as cheaply as possible from the kind of factories that H&M and Zara wouldn’t touch, who order material from horrendous dye houses, who order their chemicals from the guy down the street, and those chemicals can be mining or pharmaceutical waste.
(If you want to know more about this, I would like to direct you to my book, which describes my visit to Tirupur in India to see the dye houses in question.)
Or, you’re looking at a website that is that garbage garment factory, advertising directly to you. Nobody is checking to make sure the clothing is well-designed or safe. They simply do not care.
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a sweatshop.
It’s symptomatic of our times that these websites manage to suck so many people in. If you take just 20 seconds, you can tell that they’re not to be trusted. And yet, we click, we buy, and we justify it by saying it’s, “only 20 bucks. If I don’t like it, I’ll just donate it.” Poor Goodwill! That charity doesn’t deserve this.
So, let me quickly walk you through how to tell if you’re about to order from a clothing scam site. And when I say quickly, I mean that you could spot any of one these tells in about five seconds, once you know what you’re looking for.