“The brand’s FAQ would lead me to believe that the clothes are spontaneously generated through some process of Olsenian glandular secretion.”
I hate The Row.
✨ Hate Read Season 2 is brought to you by the legendary champion of indie media herself, Ruth Ann Harnisch, of the Harnisch Foundation. ✨
The emperor’s newest clothes are from The Row. Let’s start with some basic math: one popular fabric hawker lists its cheapest black cashmere at $130 per yard, while a simple black 100% cotton goes for around $20 for the same length. COS, a brand known for its reliable basics, offers a black, 100% cashmere tank top, precisely slim-cut and ribbed, for $135 at full price, hot off the factory line. The Row lists its cotton “Aika Relaxed Tank Top” at $520.
If both tanks used about a yard of fabric each, this would lead to the logical conclusion that COS was turning a $5 profit, maximum (not accounting for any costs beyond materials), for their version while The Row pocketed a hundred times that amount per purchase of the top that does look “relaxed…” a little too relaxed for something that purports to have a gestalt value 26 times that of its materials.
“But they’re probably paying their workers handsomely while COS sops up the blood, sweat, and tears of beleaguered child slaves!” I’m not going to shill for COS, either, but only one of the two brands even has a “Suppliers” section on their website as some gesture toward production transparency — I’ll let you guess which. The Row’s “About” section is as sparse as its aesthetic sensibilities, name-checking only the illustrious Mary-Kate and Ashley, while the brand’s FAQ would lead me to believe that the clothes are spontaneously generated through some process of Olsenian glandular secretion, oozing out of MK & A’s petite frames fully realized.
A designer I work with has a trademark process that involves deconstructing old T-shirts into thin, nondescript strips, then reforming them into elaborate patterns that verge on lenticular optical illusions when seen from certain angles. This involves the precise puzzling and labyrinthine sewing of teensy fabric scraps — extra manual labor on top of the base practices of patterning and forming a garment. The whole process takes about two hours. Sure, material costs become negligible when you’re upcycling, but the designer prices an average tank top made using this process at around $125 — if every cent of that $125 were profit, they’d be taking home about $62.50 an hour, and typically, they earn about $32 an hour after all is said and done with merchandising and sales intermediaries.
At that rate ($32/hour), even if whichever unacknowledged laborer stretched out the production of a single straightforward, cut-and-sew Aika tank to ten hours, each shirt would still generate profit, and I will literally EAT an Aika tank if The Row’s sewists are paid a cent over the average garment worker’s wage in Italy: less than 12 USD an hour. The label’s operations were conveniently relocated from the US to Italy in the early days of the pandemic. If each top takes, say, three hours to sew, at $12 an hour, $464 is still unaccounted for after materials and labor.
So, where is it all going, assuming The Row isn’t, against all reason and odds, paying its employees spectacular, above-industry-norm wages? The Row’s materials aren’t particularly special — the brand often uses synthetic blends, as is the case in this $1,390 shift dress, and though I have worked in fashion enough to know that this isn’t necessarily unacceptable, the caveats that do necessitate the use of polyester are nearly always in the case of extremely sculptural pieces, most famously Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please line (a black tank top from it, for reference).
Meanwhile, The Row is noted for its minimal, uncomplicated designs, and I would not argue that the aforementioned shift dress (in Target parlance, a “T-shirt dress”) warranted the use of a triacetate-poly blend. Notably, these designs are so minimal that brands like COS have become famous in their own right for duping The Row accurately enough that it became a TikTok genre. Nearly all designer dupes are inferior to their inspirations, and if they’re not, it’s typically because the original piece utilizes materials and techniques accessible enough that the only factor that sets it apart from its copycats is a blatantly arbitrary markup. Such is the case with The Row.
WHY DO PEOPLE BUY THIS BRAND’S GOLD-PLATED PILES OF SHIT?
It’s not a question of me “not knowing what luxury is” — courtesy of my work, I’ve felt up the thickest, most sumptuous cotton; the softest, most manageable wool; handspun silk; mohair I wish I could cocoon myself inside until the inevitable climate apocalypse (or until it gets too hot for knits even come wintertime). Pieces that use these materials are going to be expensive, sure, but nearly every tiny indie label I know uses high-end fabrics, pays themself and their colleagues handsomely, and still charges significantly less for comparable products. You’re asking $415 for an elaborately-sewn, locally-made, deadstock cotton sundress? Sure. Or $150 for a beautifully-made tank top from well-paid artisans in Los Angeles? Absolutely. What about $890 for emphatically trendy jelly flats (based on a trend from the 80s that gained popularity specifically for its affordability) best known for, uh, breaking within hours of purchase? That’s a mental illness, a character defect, or a humiliation kink.
Sure, there are plenty of luxury brands committing heinous crimes against humanity that I could feel nauseous about, but The Row has the distinguished honor of being crowned as the paragon of luxury, the epitome of “chic.” (I also hate the word “chic,” but that’s a different essay.) In reality, The Row makes boring, overpriced clothes for boring people with too much money on their hands, and if you buy its wares, I am wary of YOU.
And to The Row: stay away from Ayo Edebiri.
First off, I'm all for hating on The Row, no disagreements here. Where's the money going? Into the pockets of the owners, investors, and advertisers. Certainly not to materials or labor.
That said, dear hater, not much of the math here scales to industry levels. Taking the cashmere example, cashmere varies drastically in quality (fiber length) and price. Cashmere sold to consumers by the yard is very different in price from cashmere sold at scale to massive retailers. Look at "budget cashmere" from Quince - they list a similar "Featherweight Cashmere Ribbed Tank" for $49.90 and tell you that the materials are $14.67 and "crafting" is $9.83. For a mildly fancier example, Everlane's "The Classic Tank in Cashmere" retails at $118 and they claim that materials are $13.81 and labor is $9.50. You can imagine COS's costs aren't far off, they just market as a (slightly) more elevated brand.
I'd love to see some links to the "$415 for an elaborately-sewn, locally-made, deadstock cotton sundress? Sure. Or $150 for a beautifully-made tank top from well-paid artisans in Los Angeles? "