Shein, the ultra-low-cost fashion empire that once captured the imagination of global markets with a $100 billion private valuation, has arrived at Hong Kong's public stage humbled — priced at $27 billion, a figure that speaks less to failure than to the sobering arithmetic of tariffs, regulatory scrutiny, and the end of boundless growth assumptions. The IPO, the largest in Hong Kong this year, marks a passage from the mythology of hyper-scale to the harder discipline of sustainable margins. In this transition, Shein joins a long lineage of companies that discovered the distance between what m