Everlane and the Death of the “Good” Millennial Life-Style Brand

In 2017, the clothing brand Everlane opened its first brick-and-mortar store in Nolita. Right down the block from the former location of the bookstore McNally Jackson, it was a beacon of retail at the time, austere, brightly lit, and installed with shelving that brought to mind a gym locker room at an upscale hotel. It stocked blandly tasteful basics, both men’s and women’s, that promised something like a middle-class millennial American dream: You, too, could wear a white oxford shirt, flat-front chinos, and flesh-colored ballet flats; commute to an office job that mainly consisted of sending e-mails and looking at the internet; and get a craft cocktail at happy hour for ten dollars without having to go home and change.

Everlane was founded in 2011, a paragon of the direct-to-consumer startup wave that saw dozens of well-funded, instantly omnipresent retailers popping up to sell thoughtfully designed toothbrushes, kitchenware, suitcases, and any other mundane accessory that people once would have bought at a department store. The establishment of an Everlane store seemed to represent a triumphant moment for the company’s understated, aspirational vision. The brand’s logo did not appear obviously on its clothes; the designs were resolutely uninteresting, even ignorable. Yet the materials were high-quality, the prices were affordable, and labels informed customers which Chinese factories made up its supply chain. Everlane’s hallmarks were efficiency and transparency—admirable qualities, though they didn’t necessarily inspire long-term loyalty or enthusiasm. Anodyne office wear became less relevant in the era of working from home; it fell to the wayside after the pandemic, as fashion trends veered flashier and logo-heavy. Last week, Everlane was subsumed by the Death Star of online fast-fashion retailers, the Chinese company Shein, best known for its extremely low prices and its habit of duping newly popular designs. On Tuesday, the Everlane co-founder Michael Preysman announced a new project that sounds like a plea: Still Radical. “Same principles, but a new take,” the website reads. “And this time: no venture capital, no private equity.”

Many of the brands that marked the peak of millennial consumer culture have lately been deconstructed or sold off. This year, Allbirds, maker of the squishy sneaker that defined the tech-bro wardrobe, sold its intellectual property to the fashion conglomerate American Exchange Group, and the resulting shell pivoted to building infrastructure for artificial intelligence. BuzzFeed, the publication that defined viral content, sold a majority stake to Byron Allen, a media entrepreneur who also owns the Weather Channel; its founder and C.E.O., Jonah Peretti, stepped down. Blue Apron, the meal-kit startup that shipped prepackaged, pre-sliced ingredients that busy young adults could throw together and feel virtuous about cooking, sold to Wonder Group, an expanding chain of ghost kitchens promising cheffy delivery “for every craving.” Outdoor Voices athleisure, Parade underwear, and Dollar Shave Club toiletries have all disappeared into conglomerates. One Medical, a boutique primary-care provider notable for its soothing, pastel-colored interiors and text-message-based care, sold to Amazon, falling to the same mediocritizing fate as Whole Foods.

Most startups fail, of course. In 2021, I wrote a column about how many of the products offered by these companies were not particularly good to begin with, and how they cloaked their flaws in sleek graphic design and suggestions of “community” with one’s fellow consumers. But this recent wave of consolidation follows a larger pattern. Companies that were initially flooded with investment have found themselves out of cash; what Derek Thompson called the “millennial lifestyle subsidy,” when venture capital incentivized the development of cheap, technologically mediated products ranging from Ubers to wide-legged denim, was revoked. After a number of such companies subsequently flopped, all that was left for the remaining owners or private-equity investors to monetize were the shreds of attachment to the brand names. We are now in that zombified phase when it’s hard to know what the brands even consist of anymore. What was once marketed as a new form of authenticity has degraded to naked profit extraction.