The Cult of Fashion Nova by Sophia Tone

Last spring, Atlantans noticed signs posted on poles around the city claiming that “Fashion Nova kidnaps girls.” The signs offered no elaboration, so concerned citizens turned to the internet for answers. One Reddit user mentioned that they’d seen the signs on vehicles around metro Atlanta and in Instagram posts, but that a Google search on the alleged kidnappings had turned up nothing.

In response to social media queries, Fashion Nova stated over Twitter in early April that they were “aware of the alarming signs being posted throughout the Atlanta, Georgia area, and have notified law enforcement of these false and defamatory claims.” They added, “…there is no truth to these allegations whatsoever.”

One theory for what may have inspired the posts in Atlanta is the brand’s new kids’ fashion line. Aimed at little girls, the line boasts crop tops and tight-fitting outfits. Check out, for example, this bustier top made for one to six year-olds. The company is under heavy fire for sexualizing minors with this new clothing in the midst of a wave of backlash against the fast fashion industry as a whole.

Both of these hypotheses approach the kidnapping idea, especially given that many of the women employed are immigrants from Latin America and Asia. A related theory posits that sex traffickers use the Fashion Nova name to lure girls into a fake brand deal.

Despite these plausible explanations for the signs being put up in Atlanta, some citizens are convinced that the Fashion Nova conspiracy is linked to a satanic cult operating in the area. Users on Reddit and Instagram have reported that a man living in the Fayetteville area is responsible for signs connecting Satanism to Fashion Nova. His identity is unknown, but his neighbors say that he has spray painted his truck with messages about Satan and that he often hands out flyers about missing women of color.

Whatever their involvement in organized crime, Fashion Nova is undeniably guilty of being part of the “fast-fashion” industry. Fast fashion is a relatively new term in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which perhaps speaks to its rapid and arguably unethical rise. It’s defined as “an approach to the design, creation, and marketing of clothing fashions that emphasizes making fashion trends quickly and cheaply available to consumers.” Fashion Nova, along with companies such as Shein and Forever 21, participates in fast fashion by rapidly producing articles of clothing perceived as trendy. Its environmental impact is staggering.

According to The True Cost, the world now consumes 400 percent more clothing than twenty years ago, and the average American produces 82 pounds of textile waste per year. The fast-fashion industry uses about 3000 liters of water per cotton shirt, and it’s estimated that 20 percent of the wastewater worldwide stems from fast fashion alone. These are just a few of the consequences of fast fashion’s natural resource exploitation. Among others is the appearance of plastics in the ocean, an increase of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and the harmful use of pesticides on plants and wildlife.

While serious, these environmental offenses offer little illumination on the Fashion Nova conspiracy. The alarming way that Fashion Nova treats its workers––especially women––may shed some light on the allegations . In a New York Times article about the company, both female and male employees at the Los Angeles location say that they were paid illegally-low wages, but women are affected the most because they make up the brunt of the garment industry. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, women comprise about 80% of the world’s garment workers, and in fact LA’s Garment Worker Center reports the same statistic for the city.

Because Fashion Nova’s production cycle is so unusually fast, articles need to be produced in a short amount of time. To work at such high speeds without spending a fortune, they pay their employees per piece instead of by the hour. For poor women, who make up most of the garment industry, this experience is particularly widespread. Mercedes Cortez, an employee who sewed for Fashion Nova, told the New York Times that she worked in a rat and roach-infested subcontractor factory where she was paid “about 4 cents to sew on each sleeve, 5 cents for each of the side seams, [and] 8 cents for the seam on the neckline.” Many more have had similar experiences.

The kidnapping argument is still murky, but the stories of women working for the garment industry are not. Their lives represent just one example of the intersection of feminism, capitalism, and environmental impact. Whatever the true motive behind the mysterious signs that popped up in Atlanta last spring, they’ve exposed violations of human rights that are embedded in the way Fashion Nova and its contemporaries do business. Whether or not these violations can be likened to kidnapping is perhaps not important at all.