hot take on replica fashion

today i did an open call for hot take requests on the blog. someone wrote thoughts on replica fashion so here is my hot take:

first thing i ever owned was a guccy cap. i still have it and its almost broken. its been fiteen years and i have had a real one in the meantime. didnt love it. donated it to charity in the end cus it didnt feel glam. i appreciated the design and the quality of a real one, but a gucci cap is another type of object than lets say an iris van herpen, mcqueen or a small emerging designer's work: actual art pieces. the gucci monogram represents something else. it represents mass production, which does not bother me at all. i'm drawn to it, but for different reasons of why a mcqueen makes me gag. to me, the gucci monogram is the mass media of fashion, the mtv logo in the corner. the place anybody can access. real or fake. the logo is strong enough to exist on a real leather suitcase to the plastic version thats laying in the street, looking up at you from a layout made from black trashbags. in fact brands have taken this strategy to sell the real stuff. i once saw a brand roll out a whole campaign in the streets of nyc as it if was all fake replicas of themsleves. much later, gucci did a guccy collection and then demna and so on.... who's copying who? brands faking themselves is the image of why the gucci monogram was made to be copied. when a fake refers directly to the brand - not as a design - but as a statement on the zeitgeist, pop culture and mass media then i'm choosing the fake version and loving it. the paradox of what its representing: luxury made in a sweatshop (and the fact that all the fake caps are made there but the real ones are made there as well...) is actually dreadful but a very precise image of consumption culture. owning a fake artwork/design piece i would never. i support emerging designers cus they are the ones i can afford, appreceate the unapproachabilty of haute couture and wear fake gucci caps.
on the pic i'm wearing a new guccy cap + north face x guccy puffer + my own design: a floor length t-shirt tucked into jeans that says: EVERYTHING IS REAL!

Pics by Skyf Marina: Photographer and journalist Helsinki, Tokyo