The Doll, the Department Store, and the Death of Good Taste

The Chinese e-commerce platform Shein is in the crosshairs of French authorities. Following a scandal that revealed the sale of silicone sex dolls shaped like infants on French territory, the prime minister has just taken the unprecedented decision to suspend Shein’s activities in France. The omnipotence of the low-cost platform is causing outrage among many. But who is to blame?

A few days after the scandal broke, Sébastien Lecornu decided to take decisive action: “On the prime minister’s instructions, a procedure has been launched to suspend Shein for as long as it takes for the platform to demonstrate to the public authorities that all its content is finally in compliance with our laws and regulations,” announced a statement released in the early afternoon of November 5th.

The case of the dolls—child-like sex figurines sold on Shein’s marketplace, i.e., the platform open to third-party sellers—is only the trigger for a stormy relationship between the French authorities and the Chinese giant. The rift has been brewing for several months: French retailers have accused their competitors of not playing by the rules and threatening the future of commerce in France. They complain about the inaction of political leaders in both Paris and Brussels.

Coincidentally, the doll scandal reached its peak on the very day that the historic BHV, or Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, one of Paris’s most iconic department stores, chose to open a ‘corner’ dedicated to the sale of Shein products—a first in the world.

The symbolism is shocking. For generations of French and Parisians, the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville was a legendary place where, not so long ago, you could wander around feeling as if you were walking through Zola’s novel about department stores, Au Bonheur des Dames. Like its counterpart La Samaritaine, which has since disappeared, “you could find everything at the BHV,” from brass door handles for Haussmann-style apartments to boar bristle brushes for polishing leather.

But a few years ago, BHV was bought by a young, ambitious entrepreneur, Frédéric Merlin, who put all the energy he had learned in business school into demolishing everything that made the old establishment so charming. The DIY aisles, where you could always miraculously find something you hadn’t even come to look for, began to give way to flashy clothing brands for wealthy Parisians. And then, one day, the decision was made to create a Shein stand.

The decision is easy to understand: the new boss’s management of BHV scared away the customer base. “Declining footfall, empty shelves, growing losses and worried business partners,” explained the newspaper Le Monde in an article published in early October. Opening the door to the Chinese giant was therefore seen as a way to fill the coffers, even though Shein is perhaps the most opposite embodiment of the spirit of the historic BHV. In a well-meaning interview with Le Figaro a few days ago, Merlin persisted with his strategy, saying he wanted to “build bridges” and choose prosperity and “the way of history”—with a clear conscience about profit and a lack of morality that even the most die-hard Marxist would find hard to imagine.

The Shein scandal has hit Merlin hard on his bridge. You can’t make a profit at any cost without paying for it one day, and those who tried to warn him about his evil alliance with Chinese junk couldn’t have imagined how far the brand would end up taking them. Today, Merlin hypocritically condemns the sale of the silicone dolls, of course, but he is too far along his beloved bridge to turn back.

Let’s take a step back. Perhaps we could consider that there is a touch of snobbery in spitting on Shein, which at least has the merit of enabling millions of families around the world to dress at low cost with products that are certainly made in China but are pretty much the same junk as that sold at three times the price in more prominent and fashionable shops.

The real culprits are not those who succumb to the lure of low prices, even if it is at the expense of the environment, quality, and so on.

The real culprits are those who, year after year, have taken great care to dismantle the entire national industry that allowed honest little French towns—I come from one of them—to produce their own textiles to clothe honest French people. Equally guilty are those who have mocked the common sense of mothers who bought simple, elegant, and durable clothes for themselves and their children, without giving in to the outrageous whims of fashion, which, according to the so-called ‘fast fashion’ standards, encourages you to renew your wardrobe every three months.

These reflexes of sobriety, elegance, and good manners are obviously not in the interests of people like Mr Merlin or the Chinese boss of Shein. But at least they had the merit of making the French proud of themselves, proud of their work and their savoir-faire.

Shein thrives in a world without morals; the sale of silicone dolls is just another lamentable episode in this slow decline. We can criticise, lament and protest, as Mr Lecornu does, but reversing the course of events that led to the triumph of this trade is another matter entirely. It is not certain that we are ready today to draw all the practical conclusions that would be necessary to achieve this.