If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED
Earlier this month I complimented a friend on her new Bottega Jodie bag. She had recently got a promotion at work, and is now a senior manager at a respectable record label earning six figures. The bag was a celebratory gift, she told me, only it wasn’t Bottega—it was a dupe.
As someone who has a closet full of designer labels—and who could certainly afford to buy the real thing—her admission surprised me. My face must have given that away. “It’s real Italian leather,” she quickly followed up, “and their website says they manufacture in the same factories as some luxury brands. You couldn’t tell the difference, so why would I spend thousands more for basically the same thing?”
It’s a question many have been asking since dupe culture went supernova over the last few years. A shorthand for duplicate, dupes are cheaper alternatives that are basically the same as the real thing. Think of it as a cousin to counterfeit culture, but instead of being a cheap knock-off that infringes on a brand’s trademark, they’re uncannily similar imitations—promising the same qualities of the product at a fraction of the cost.
It’s not just my friend who loves them either. Roughly one-third of all US adults have intentionally bought a dupe, according to Morning Consult, with that figure rising to almost half for Gen Z shoppers and 44% for millennials. In the UK, research by Mintel shows 47% of consumers are now open to buying luxury lookalikes in 2024, compared to just 12% in 2016.
“The shame of buying these things has gone,” says Alice Sherwood, author of Authenticity: Reclaiming Reality in a Counterfeit Culture. “Luxury prices have skyrocketed while the trend cycle has rapidly accelerated. People no longer want to spend upwards of £4000 on the latest ‘It’ bag that might be out of vogue within a year.”
Add their proliferation on social media into that mix, and the dupe culture has been normalised in ways that “knock-offs” from Canal Street never were, she says.
Just one scroll on TikTok would affirm this. At the time of writing over 260,000 posts have been made under the #dupes hashtag, with the majority featuring creators sharing their best dupe finds across fashion, beauty, lifestyle and homeware. Most of the time they’re from fast fashion retailers like Shein, Amazon and Temu, but more recently, a new crop of companies have been dominating dupe culture by offering quite a different proposition.
Low-Price Luxury
Take my friend’s new favourite brand, Quince. According to their website their mission is “to create products of equal or greater quality than the leading luxury brands at a much lower price”. To do so they’ve sourced factories used by “well-known luxury brands” to manufacture their goods, but by cutting out the middlemen and hefty markup, they can sell them at far more affordable prices.
They’re not the only ones. Leather goods manufacturer Sitoy Group Holdings regularly uploads videos on social media showcasing how the quality of its $100 handbags is almost identical to those sold for upwards of $1000, all the while advertising that they use the same production lines used by Prada, Tumi and Michael Kors. Then there's Chicjoc, one of the largest Chinese fashion apparel brands on Taobao and Tmall, promoting products it claims are made from animal fur provided by the same supplier as LVMH and Fendi.
This shift towards high-quality dupes puts luxury brands in a difficult position. For decades, they’ve justified their high prices with the promise of superior craftsmanship and materials. They've even poked fun at these imitations. But when brands are offering near-identical goods allegedly manufactured in the same factory as luxury brands for much, much less, that justification starts to crumble.
Another brand that has gained significant traction online this year is Los Angeles-based premium basics brand, Italic, with many consumers on Reddit expressing their satisfaction with the quality of the products. “Most of our products take 5–10 sample runs and 6–18 months, sometimes even longer,” says Italic CEO Jeremy Cai. “Our sourcing process involves rigorous vetting and ongoing quality controls, including factory certifications, samples, and production quality.”
This meticulous approach stands in stark contrast to what many might expect. Italic contacts 20-30 potential suppliers, evaluates 5-7 factories, and ultimately works with just 1-2 of them for any given product category, visiting each factory on-site.
The key difference between Italic and the high-profile brands using the same factories, Cai explains, is in the pricing: “Most of our factories' clients sell for 2-4x more than our SRPs (Suggested Retail Prices), often much higher.” By cutting out the markup typically associated with luxury goods, Italic offers high-quality products at a more accessible price point.
Cai is quick to point out that Italic does not market itself as a “dupe” brand. However, that hasn’t stopped consumers from drawing comparisons to more expensive luxury labels. In contrast, competitor Quince leans into dupe culture, positioning itself more overtly as a challenger to high-end brands. On Quince's website, woven intrecciato handbags, which resemble Bottega Veneta's iconic designs, are showcased alongside price comparisons to their luxury counterparts.
Quince also frequently analyses luxury competitors’ best-selling items to identify opportunities for replication. “Data collection is crucial in our product development process,” says a Quince spokesperson. “Our team uses a variety of sources, including Google Trends, social media, and customer feedback, to understand the market and ensure we’re delivering what people want.”
Quince’s strategy is built on the belief that luxury can—and should—be more accessible. “Our founding team, with years of experience in luxury and DTC (direct-to-consumer) retail, knew that competitors add a 40–60% markup on similar products,” continues the spokesperson. “As costs in the luxury market become more transparent, consumers are less willing to accept these inflated prices.”
To that end, Quince works globally to source manufacturing partners that share their commitment to transparency, while innovating to keep costs down. Every product page on their site includes detailed information about materials, country of origin, and certifications for working conditions along the supply chain.
Luxury brands, on the other hand, have traditionally kept their manufacturing processes shrouded in secrecy. William Lasry, founder of Glass Factory, is working to change that.
Lasry travels the globe, visiting and spotlighting factories with superior craftsmanship and ethical practices across his social media platforms. While not all brands are doing their very best, he is sceptical about some companies' supposed connections to luxury factories, pointing out that these dupe brands frequently exploit this ambiguity for marketing purposes.
“There are many instances where a factory will produce a sample for a luxury brand,” Lasry explains. “Luxury brands often request samples from hundreds of factories, but in many cases, nothing materialises beyond the sample stage. The factory might then turn around and claim, ‘We’ve made samples for Gucci,’ even though no production deal was ever finalised.”
Petros Analytis, head of research at Glass Factory, agrees that it’s hard to draw the line. “Unless they let us come into the factories and see for ourselves, it’s hard to ascertain.”
Premium Tax
While transparency might be slowly improving, one thing the luxury market has always clung onto is its appeal. Conglomerates like LVMH and Kering built empires on the foundation of an alluring narrative—one that combines centuries of heritage with modern-day prestige. By blending Old World craftsmanship with the new-age glamour of celebrity culture, they made handbags, shoes, and clothing a gateway to an elite, exclusive world.
For a long time consumers were happy to pay big bucks to belong in this world. Perhaps unknowingly, they were buying not just a product but an experience. The true value of a designer label wasn't simply measured by the stitching or material, but by the feeling it evoked—the confidence boost, the social status, the feeling of exclusivity. “It’s a real skill to make a handbag into an object desired by millions of women, one that has so much meaning and can do so much for your self-confidence,” notes Sherwood.
Yet, behind the curtain of glamour, the reality of some products was very different. While consumers believed they were buying the pinnacle of luxury, what they were often getting was a product only marginally superior to midrange alternatives—and occasionally no better at all. The excessively high margins were less a reflection of quality and more a tax on the brands' appeal.
“They are the architects of their own problems,” continues Sherwood. “By making so much of their products not about the tangible product, but about the intangible aspects of the brands - those sexy ads, the celebs who carry your products, the stores, the glossy ads, the slogans, the heritage backstory, all that stuff that isn’t actually the product itself.”
In turn they’ve created an enormous gap between what consumers are actually paying for and the real value of the product. As these companies have increasingly pursued the ultra-wealthy, they’ve left a gap in the market that other brands, eager to capitalise, are starting to fill. “They know that the prices at the very top of luxury are too high to reflect the actual value,” Sherwood says. “But have turned these notable silhouettes and styles into desirable items that a dupe brand can free ride off of.”
Then, recently, the veneer began to crack even further. In March, Italian luxury brand Loro Piana became embroiled in scandal after an investigation revealed the material behind their $9,000 sweaters was sourced by low-paid workers in Peru. Just a few months later, in July, Italian prosecutors alleged sweatshop-like conditions in factories supplying certain products for high-end labels such as Dior and Armani. The revelations triggered outrage among consumers, many of whom had long trusted these brands to uphold the highest standards of craftsmanship and ethics.
Across online forums like the r/handbag subreddit, once-loyal customers voiced their disillusionment. For many, these scandals revealed that the luxury brands they idolised were not living up to their promises. Both Loro Piana and Dior have denied the allegations. However, The Business of Fashion revealed that Milan's public prosecutor said in a court document that they had found “an illegal practice so entrenched and proven [that it could] be considered part of a broader business policy exclusively aimed at increasing profit.” Neither company has been charged in relation to the probe.
Such reputational damage couldn’t have come at a worse time for luxury brands. Coupled with the rise of dupe culture, these scandals are forcing consumers to rethink their relationship with high-end goods. If craftsmanship is no longer exceptional, and ethical practices are called into question, what exactly are people paying for when they buy luxury?
Rebuilding the Dream
Recent sales figures underline just how far demand for luxury mega-brands has fallen from its post-pandemic highs. In July, some of the industry’s biggest players reported disappointing revenues for the second consecutive quarter. LVMH, the world’s leading luxury conglomerate, missed sales estimates, while Gucci’s parent company Kering, experienced a decline of 11%. Other major brands like Richemont and Burberry also reported disappointing figures, with first-quarter sales plummeting by a staggering 20%.
At the heart of luxury’s current struggles is the erosion of the very dream that once propelled the industry. The disconnect between the marketing mythology and the reality of production has left consumers feeling disillusioned, meaning the days of blindly paying a premium for a logo may be at risk.
The democratisation of information and consumer power through social media has played a huge part in this. Platforms like TikTok and Reddit are filled with conversations that challenge the industry's value proposition, which has made it so much harder for luxury brands to control their narrative.
To regain their position, Brittany Steiger, principal analyst of retail & eCommerce at Mintel says they will need to focus on what once made them so desirable—authenticity, superior craftsmanship, and a narrative of prestige that feels both aspirational and attainable. Some experts suggest that embracing more transparent practices and truly living up to their ethical and quality promises could also be the way forward. Brands that fail to do so, may find themselves increasingly irrelevant in a world where high-quality dupes continue to gain ground.
It’s clear that the old model of luxury has been disrupted, and it’s no longer just about price anymore. In the battle between heritage and value, consumers are asking more questions—and luxury brands must have better answers. And if they don’t, there’s a whole industry on the sidelines who do.
