The World’s Most Popular Fashion Brand

While The British Fashion Awards has been busy grabbing headlines this week, a news story that is the event’s antithesis has been quietly overlooked. This being 2022, it isn’t a good news story, but a grim one. Brace yourselves: Shein is the world’s most popular fashion brand. 

After crunching a year’s worth of search data on Google, this, at least, was the conclusion reached by money.co.uk, on the basis that Shein topped the list of most searched-for brands in 113 countries. Zara was a very distant second, being the most searched-for brand in only 26 countries. The UK can pat itself lightly on the back, since Shein wasn’t its most popular fashion search: that accolade fell to Next. 

As a data nerd, to say I “love” these results would be erroneous, since what they say about our shopping habits is depressing. But I do relish the truth of them, and how it proves that we are much less virtuous than the sustainable, ethically minded shoppers that we purport to be. As consumers, most of us greenwash as audaciously as the brands we criticise, and never more so than at Christmas, when most of us embark on a buying frenzy for ourselves and others. While it’s impossible to equate searches for Shein with purchases of Shein, for journalists and PRs alike, these results are a reminder that as an indicator of the world’s shopping habits, data trumps spin every time.