Platformized creativity: Sheinification and the creative transformation of fast fashion in China

SHEIN’s rise from a China-based cross-border fashion retailer to a globally recognized ultra-fast-fashion platform reveals how labor-intensive garment production has been reorganized through digital platformisation. Existing accounts often describe Sheinification as a symptom of overproduction, environmental damage, and labor exploitation. While these critiques are important, they do not fully explain how SHEIN has become a trend-setting platform for low-cost fashion products. Based on qualitative fieldwork in China with buyers, designers, data analysts, suppliers, and production-related actors, this article develops the concept of platformized creativity to explain how creative cultural products are generated, tested, revised, and scaled through a platform-industrial system. We argue that SHEIN’s creative mechanism cannot be understood only through designer originality or platform data. It depends on a wider test-and-scale process that links recombinatory design work, copyright-risk management, platform metrics, consumer feedback, small-batch manufacturing, and supplier responsiveness. In contrast to accounts of platformized cultural production centred mainly on virtual cultural goods and individual creators, the case of SHEIN foregrounds the materiality of cultural production under platform capitalism. Platformized creativity, we argue, is a labor-intensive and materially grounded mode of cultural production that connects digital metrics with China’s dense, flexible, and low-cost manufacturing infrastructure.