Misguided in Name, Misguided in Nature: An honest review of the C4's Inside Missguided: Made in Manchester
Despite its promising title, viewers are offered a very limited glimpse inside Missguided’s supply chain in a PR-friendly documentary that is riddled with faux empowerment and white feminism, says Melissa Watt
Taking inspiration from BBC’s Breaking Fashion– a behind-the-scenes look at the fashion e-tailer In The Style – Channel 4 recently premiered a documentary which follows the 230 “badass bitches” at the top of Missguided. The decision to commission yet another show that glorifies fast fashion is a perplexing one. Channel 4 previously aired a Dispatches investigation in 2017 which found that Missguided were paying garment workers in Leicester between £3 and £3.50 an hour. What’s more the programme aired only weeks after rival, Boohoo, were too caught up in a sweatshop scandal in Leicester.
It’s against this unfortunate backdrop that we are introduced to the highly Instagrammable, pink fitted Missguided HQ in Manchester – a city insensitively titled the “empire of fast fashion”. Missguided’s commitment to “keep[ing] British manufacturing alive” is admirable, while the brand’s northern hotspot rebels against a London-centric fashion industry. The “made in Manchester” premise, however, is misleading.
Of Missguided’s 179 supplier factories, only 7.8% are located in the UK, with 1 in Rochdale and 13 in Leicester. The reality show antics of Missguided HQ, then, offer microscopic insight into the company’s daily operations. Viewers are offered subtle glimpses of the brand’s global supply chain only thrice – once when a sample collection is chased up from a Chinese supplier and again when 1,000 units are ordered from a Pakistani factory to be made and delivered in a matter of days.
The third glaring red flag is when a Missguided buyer haggles a supplier into making a dress for a mere £7.40. When you deduct the cost of materials, packaging and shipping, little money is left for the garment workers making this dress. In fact, Missguided makes no claim and there is no public evidence that its suppliers are paying a living wage.
Missguided can surely afford to pay garment workers fairly if they’re able to offer Love Island finalist, Molly-Mae Hague, £350,000 and a Range Rover for a collaborative clothing collection. £350k is the equivalent of a year’s worth of pay for 1,116 garment workers in Bangladesh, where the average annual wage is just £300.
The omission of garment workers is not all that surprising; a focus on the garment factory experience would likely unravel Missguided’s carefully crafted image of female empowerment. CEO, Nitin Passi, defines empowerment as the ability to “do what you want” but this agency is only awarded to the lucky few who have scored a job at the brand’s glitzy HQ. Empowerment, it would seem, is only skin deep, as an office tour reveals that the majority of its employees are slim, white women. Before the show’s debut, Missguided were called out for performatively claiming solidarity with the BLM movement. Its surface level approach to diversity and non-representative office surely speak to this contradiction.
In another act of gatekeeping, plus-sized customers are largely excluded from the brand’s girl boss ethos. Through a series of fatphobic remarks, Missguided’s view of what it calls “edgy big babes” are made abundantly clear. Despite plans to splash the cash on a Molly-Mae collaboration, plus-sized models, we are told, are too expensive to hire. When casting for a campaign, an employee excitedly exclaims “I don’t look at her and see size 20” in reference to one of the auditioning models. Another model is rejected because her “full on curve might be a bit too much for the shoot”. Meanwhile, a photographer tells an influencer that “thumbs are fashion, fingers are for fat people”.
Even within its own whitewashed premises, this self-proclaimed feminism is built on shaky foundations. According to the brand’s 2018 Gender Pay Gap Report, there is a 46% median average pay gap in favour of men. The same report proudly boasts that 78% of its colleagues are women.
The issues of ethics and sustainability are given little air time in comparison to the day-to-day activities of its potty-mouthed staff. Missguided vaguely claims to have “sharpened up [its] act because in the past [they] haven’t always got it right”, alluding to its 2017 sweatshop scandal. To reassure viewers, we are invited along to an audit review of a potential new supplier. The factory passes with flying colours, though how representative it is of Missguided’s global supply chain is uncertain.
When interviewed by a Financial Times journalist, Passin states that “fast fashion gets painted with one brush which is not necessarily fair”. In the same interview, he reveals that roughly 3,500 new products are uploaded to the site every month. The CEO takes no responsibility for this staggering amount of disposable fashion: “the demand for newness, that’s fuelled by the customer, not us”.
In another contradiction, the third episode, with its mild focus on sustainability, is followed by a concluding episode which documents the runup to Black Friday. Viewers are treated to a dizzily nauseating view of Missguided’s 250 square foot warehouse which handles thousands of orders daily. Amid global scrutiny of the fashion industry’s environmental footprint, the documentary’s celebration of the “fast” in fast fashion seems amiss.
In some ways, the documentary’s title is entirely fitting. Inside Missguided is a misguided documentary which disguises much of the business’s problematic structures and ignores consumer appetite for sustainability. Among other things, the documentary skims over Passin’s absence at the Environmental Audit Committee’s hearing on fast fashion, denies founded allegations of stolen designs and overlooks that infamous £1 bikini. Sadly, what could have been a forward-thinking documentary about pivoting to sustainability was yet another propagandic, tone-death show.
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