The Dupe Economy!

Walmart started selling a handbag for around seventy-eight dollars late in 2024. It had the trapezoidal silhouette, the flap, the strap arrangement, and the general bearing of a Hermès Birkin, a bag whose entry price runs to five figures and whose waiting list has passed into folklore. The internet immediately dubbed it the Wirkin. It was sold out. Journalists asked Hermès executives about it in interviews, and they didn’t like the question. The curious thing about the Wirkin is not its existence. Knockoffs of expensive things have existed long before capitalism. The truly amazing thing is that nobody involved was faking it. Walmart didn’t say it was a Birkin. Buyers didn’t believe it was a Birkin. The people posting videos of themselves unboxing it weren't confessing a crime; they were bragging. The whole transaction was carried out openly, with a kind of jaunty defiance, and was almost certainly legal.

Nobody dupes the quiet bag. A signal that cannot be read is not worth faking.

That’s the trick. It is not a fake, forgery, or counterfeit in any legally recognized sense but a product designed to deliver the visual appeal of an expensive item at a fraction of the cost, marketed on that basis. Now it’s a major commercial category with its own vocabulary, its influencers, and its own aisle in the grocery store. This article looks at what the research actually says about it: what a dupe is, in law; why consumers act so strangely around them; and why the most sophisticated finding in the literature is one that almost nobody would guess.

Where the dupe economy comes from

Start with the legal architecture, because everything else follows from it.

Counterfeits are products that falsely claim their origin. It has a false mark, it purports to be something it’s not, and it’s illegal in nearly every jurisdiction. Researchers define counterfeits as products that imitate the identifying features of the original product (e.g., appearance and material cues) and falsely claim to be authentic (Kim & Ha-Brookshire, 2026). No one defends them; enforcement is conceptually simple but difficult.

A dupe is something different. It looks very similar, sometimes eerily so, to the original but it avoids claiming to be the original. It has its own honest label. And the United States, the world's biggest fashion market, largely allows such behavior. American law protects logos through trademark and certain inventions through patent, but it does not generally provide copyright protection for the design of a garment. One legal scholar has described the country as a safe haven for design piracy, a phrase that has been echoed approvingly in the recent research literature (Kim & Ha-Brookshire, 2026). Near copies are still legal, and the copying is legally tolerated until it crosses the threshold of substantial similarity or likelihood of confusion.

Kim and Ha-Brookshire suggest a more inclusive term for this entire grey zone: “legally copied products” defined as non-counterfeit products, the similarity of which makes the original design identifiable or reasonably associable. The reason for coining the term is that the category is more expansive than popular conversation assumes. It's not only the low-end brands that imitate the high-end ones. Low-end brands copy each other; high-end brands copy each other, and more often than the luxury houses would care to discuss, high-end brands quietly borrow from little independent designers who lack the resources to fight back. So the dupe economy is not a moral failing of Gen Z. It’s what happens when a big consumer appetite meets a legal structure with a hole in it. First was the hole.

Why changing more makes a dupe look less like a copy

This is where the research gets really surprising and most commentary on this subject gets it exactly backwards. Kim and Ha-Brookshire conducted two studies. The second is the only one that matters. They created a series of seven handbag variations, using a Gucci and Zara pairing chosen via a pretest precisely because consumers saw the two brands as equally familiar, eliminating brand recognition as a confound. They then systematically manipulated three design elements that American trademark case law has actually recognized as protectable: color scheme, the placement of design elements and monogram design. The variations all moved further away from the original in different combinations. They then asked 185 participants how confused they were about whether the two designs were meaningfully different or not.

The obvious intuitive prediction. The more you change the copy, the less it looks like the original. The changes are cumulative, and confusion should be phased out. Such an event didn't happen. The change in color scheme was the only difference that really stood out from the others and caused the most confusion. The rest of the design was left untouched. Confusion was reduced when the researchers changed more elements, particularly when a monogram change was combined with a color change (Kim & Ha-Brookshire, 2026).

Sit with that. The practical implication is counterintuitive in a really useful way. The most legally dangerous item in the set is a brand that takes over a competitor’s entire design language and only changes the colors. A brand that changes two or more components creates something consumers perceive as a different design, thereby distancing itself from liability while arguably copying more visibly. “Low-end brands can alter two or more design elements and make enough differences from the original to stay within the legal boundaries,” bluntly said the researchers. That’s not intuitive. You couldn't come at it by having a well-formed, refined idea. It is the result of an experiment; it is the kind of knowledge that distinguishes the designer who guesses from the designer who knows.

The stories consumers tell themselves

The first study is smaller and qualitative, ten in-depth interviews, and it is the one that lingers.

They asked participants to describe how they decided if a lookalike was a legitimate design or an obvious copy. Two elements prevailed: color schemes and monogram designs. So far, so expected. But the reason behind it was the telling part. When asked to apply the factors that American courts actually use, only one registered with them at all: the strength of the original mark. The intent of the copier, the proximity of the markets, the sophistication of consumers, and all other legal considerations were omitted. Consumers had a one-factor test; courts have an eight-factor test.

And the way that one factor goes is incredible. One participant stated that if a high-end design truly represented its brand, we would not see a million knock-offs of it. Read it over again. The availability of copies was taken as proof that the original was too undistinguished to deserve protection. The infringement shows what is infringed. Researchers said that when participants had difficulty telling the copy from the original design, they tended to devalue the originality of the original design, reducing their confusion and explaining the popularity of dupes as simply a fashion trend. Other reasons did the same. Six of the ten mentioned the trickle-down effect, describing copying as a law of fashion rather than a choice anyone made. Some said generic designs cannot really be owned, or once a design is shared by the majority, it has become a trend rather than someone’s property.

None of these people were villains. They were rationalizing their desires, just as we all do when we want something we suspect we shouldn't have. What the research captures is the machinery of that construction and how reliably it runs.

Who buys the copy, and what they are actually buying

The most useful work is from 15 years before the trend, as it shows why dupes are so particularly desirable. Han, Nunes, and Drèze identified the concept of brand prominence, which refers to the visibility of a brand logo on a product, and used it to develop a taxonomy of four consumer types based on wealth and on need for status (Han, Nunes & Drèze, 2010). The authors call the rich who do not care about status "patricians," as they prefer quiet goods that are subtly marked and legible only to people like themselves.

The rich who crave status buy loud, branded goods to show how far they are from those below them. These are the parvenus. The parvenus buy the loud imitations to imitate those who want to be seen but cannot afford the real thing. These poseurs, the writers call them. The poor and the low-born just vanish. The implications for the copy market are specific, and once expressed, self-evident. And that's what their customers are buying. That's also why you see counterfeiters and dupe makers reproducing the loud, heavily branded, conspicuous products disproportionately. No one deceives the quiet bag. The only value of the silent bag is that it is unreadable to strangers. An unreadable signal is a signal that is not worth faking.

This shifts what actually constitutes a dupe purchase. It's not about possession of an object. It’s about renting a signal. The dupe conversation is so much more charged than the price difference alone would explain because the buyer is buying the visual grammar of wealth and explicitly not paying for it. Wilcox, Kim, and Sen introduce the psychological mechanism. Their work demonstrated that the need for copies is based on the reason why someone liked the luxury brand in the first place (Wilcox, Kim, & Sen, 2009).

When a person's attachment to a brand is social, about fitting in with a group, they are markedly more open to the copy, and their preference for the real version drops afterwards. When the attachment is expressive, about who they believe themselves to be, moral considerations about copying suddenly start to matter to them, and the copy holds much less appeal. The uncomfortable corollary is that the more a luxury brand markets itself as a badge of belonging rather than a statement of self, the more effectively it trains its own customers to accept substitutes. Brands built on social pressure manufacture their own dupe demand.

The influencer engine

All of this activity would not have reached the scale it is now without a distribution mechanism. That mechanism is social media. Chaudhry told us about how dupe influencers use social platforms to promote luxury fakes, operating in a space where the commercial incentives of the platforms and the enforcement powers of the brands are badly mismatched (Chaudhry, 2022). The dupe haul, the side-by-side, the reveal of what something cost—they’re not accidental formats. They are optimized content.” They turn buying a copy from a small private compromise into a shared performance with an audience, which changes its social meaning altogether.

That’s the entire story. Counterfeit is what you hide. That is a dupe you posted. The same object, more or less, in two completely different moral positions, depending on whether the buyer is concealing or announcing. Legal scholars are now arguing that trademark law will have to adapt to this reality instead of pretending it is still policing forgeries in a back alley (Theoharidis, 2025).

What this means if you work in fashion

All of these issues have three defensible positions, and it is worth honestly naming them, rather than pretending that the evidence settles the question. One is that dupes are theft with better public relations, that design is labor, and that a legal regime that cannot protect a garment's design is simply a regime that hasn't caught up. Second, copying is the metabolism of fashion itself; every trend in history has spread by imitation, and strong design protection would freeze the industry into a museum where only the rich can afford contemporary style. Serious people take both of these seriously. There is a third position, less romantic and more useful. The question of whether dupes should exist is now largely academic, because they do exist, at scale. The practical question is what a professional does about it.

That last question is where training actually bites. Neither the consumer nor the lawyer benefits from all this research. It is the person in the room who understands both the design and the boundary, who knows that a color swap is more legally exposed than a bolder reinterpretation, who knows that loud logos invite copying and quiet marks do not, who knows that a brand that sells belonging is arming its own imitators, and who can say all of this in a meeting where everyone else is working from vibes and precedent.

That combination, design literacy plus commercial and legal awareness, is exactly what our Fashion Marketing & Management program at Raffles Jakarta develops.

https://youtu.be/wmu7x3BJYkE

Students study how brands actually create value, how consumers actually behave rather than how they say they behave, and how the commercial, legal, and creative dimensions of the industry constrain one another. It matters especially here: Indonesia sits at the center of global garment manufacturing, which means these questions are not abstract exports from a Paris boardroom but live decisions made in this region every day.

The bag is not the point

Return to the Wirkin one last time.

The leather was never why the Birkin is what it is. It is the queue, the refusal, the manufactured impossibility of simply walking in and buying one. Hermès sells scarcity, and scarcity is expensive to produce. A dupe attacks that value proposition where it is weakest, because it turns out a lot of what the customer wanted was the look, and the look was never the protected part. The bag served two purposes, carrying things and communicating, and only one of those purposes requires the original. The dupe economy has shown better than any critic could how much of value in luxury has always been in the signal, not the thing. Whether this was theft or a long-overdue correction will be fought out in the courts for the next decade, and reasonable people will end up on different sides of it. No doubt now the argument has become a permanent feature in the industry.

The designers, marketers, and brand managers who will do well in it are those who understand what is actually being bought and sold, which was never really a handbag.

Arman PourEisa

Marketing Manager

Raffles Jakarta

References

Chaudhry, P. E. (2022). Duped influencers exploiting social media to peddle luxury fakes. Business Horizons, 65(6), 719–727. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2022.07.005

Han, Y. J., Nunes, J. C., & Drèze, X. (2010). Signaling status with luxury goods: The role of brand prominence. Journal of Marketing, 74(4), 15–30. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.74.4.015

Kim, W., & Ha-Brookshire, J. E. (2026). What makes it a dupe? Exploring consumer understanding of legally copied products in the fashion industry. Fashion and Textiles, 13, Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40691-026-00457-y

Theoharidis, A. (2025). The devil wears dupes: Legal implications of "dupe culture" in the fashion industry and how trademark law should adapt. Business, Entrepreneurship & Tax Law Review, 9(1), 213–238.

Wilcox, K., Kim, H. M., & Sen, S. (2009). Why do consumers buy counterfeit luxury brands? Journal of Marketing Research, 46(2), 247–259. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.46.2.247