Best of Racked Features

Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.

For Racked, reported features were an opportunity to delve into the business, culture, history, and science of consumerism and appearance in ways big and small. Whether reporting on low wages in factories or the Bachelor Instagram influencer universe, we were interested in the totality of our shopping landscape.

• What Will We Wear on Mars?
• Why Is It So Hard for Clothing Manufacturers to Pay a Living Wage?
• Why Makeup Matters to Women in Prison
• The Sneaky Allure of the ‘Bachelor’ Instagram Influencer
• Why Aren’t Fashion ‘Disruptors’ Serving Plus-Size Customers?
• Inside America’s Growing Bulletproof Clothing Industry
• Meet the Black Girls of Goth
• MLMs Take the Worst Parts of the Gig Economy, Then Make You Pay
• How Washing Your Hair Could Help You Survive a Nuclear Blast
• Why Does Every Lifestyle Startup Look the Same?
• Do Women Actually Wear Men’s Dress Shirts After Sex?
• We Have No Idea How Bad Fashion Actually Is for the Environment
• Thinx Promised a Feminist Utopia to Everyone But Its Employees
• An Incredibly Exhaustive History of Celebrities at Fashion Week
• Unraveling the Mysteries of Aztec Secret, Amazon’s Best-Selling Beauty Product
• How Many Pairs of Tights Does It Take to Put on a Super Bowl Halftime Show?
• We’ve Forgotten How to Dress Like Adults
• What Happened to Melania Trump’s Caviar Skincare Line?
• In Between Plus and Sample Size, There Are Millions of Women
• Why Everyone on TV Has the Same Hair
• Partying with Ralph Lauren’s Biggest Fans
• I Attended a 50-Step Contouring Class with Kim Kardashian West
• Brides Get Real About What Their Weddings Actually Cost
• Behind the Scenes of Barbie’s Insanely Popular, Painstakingly-Produced Instagram
• The Music Festival Explosion and How Fashion Is Cashing In
• The Credit Card Obsessives Who Game the System—and Share Their Secrets Online
• The Fall of the Hipster Brand
• What the Tech World Doesn’t Understand About Fashion
• Smells Like Teen Spirit: Inside the Secretive World of Brandy Melville
• The Dirty Business of Buying Instagram Followers

We also put together some big packages in our time:

• The Swag Project
• The Size Conversation
• The Acne Issue