One influencer bragged that she had found a $17 dupe of the dress on Amazon in a video that got 1.2 million views and 20,000 saves, as top comments read “Amazon storefronts are the real plague of our generation,” and “we’re not meant to have everything babes.” Even with backlash, the unboxing of the dress received almost 90 thousand views and hundreds of comments with people saying they were inspired to order their own dupes.

With its innate wearability, designer look, and meaningful connection to real life, the dress immediately became a summer 2020 must-have but gave many sticker shock with its $625 price tag the dupes quickly followed. In 2021 alone, Shein received $16 billion in sales, seemingly in spite of constant criticism for the company’s negative impact on the environment and allegations of worker exploitation.Įditor’s Is Taking Over Fashion TikTok - And Dividing The Internet Only 10 years since its $5 million valuation, Shein is now the third most powerful startup in the world and is worth close to $100 billion, according to Bloomberg. Post featuring #sheinhauls - where creators buy massive pallets of clothes and try them on for the followers - rake in thousands of views and comments per video. One of the most well-known fast fashion companies, the Chinese brand Shein, has exploded in popularity due to its presence on TikTok and Instagram. Fast fashion brands like Shein, H&M, and Asos, who already redefined fashion in the e-commerce space, are now able to churn out dupes while clothes are still popular - marking a direct link between influencer-based marketing and the acceleration of mass clothing production. This contributes to an ever-accelerating trend cycle, where clothes that were necessary four weeks ago could become cheugy today.

Now, fast fashion brands have stockpiles of possible trends ready to go before models have even left the runway.īecause people active in the online fashion community often follow multiple creators, influencers get more engagement when they are constantly working to dress in new and popular styles. (Remember when Miranda Priestly helpfully broke that down?) Even when fast fashion began to pick up steam at the start of the 2000s, it took brands like Zara several weeks for affordable iterations of runway looks to be available for a mainstream, ready-to-wear market. In previous decades, these brands would often target large fashion houses like Chanel, Prada, and Coach, using designer runway shows and critical responses to eventually inspire the clothes in low-cost stores and budget collections. While the very nature of fashion has often involved reinventing popular themes or motifs, social media’s impact on fast-fashion brands has completely changed how younger generations think about clothing consumption. But on a different stage - TikTok - Gaia’s work isn’t just popular: it’s the latest target of dupe culture.ĭupes, short for duplicates, is the gen-z term for knockoffs clothes - and they’re taking over the online fashion world. The brand Mirror Palais made its New York Fashion Week debut, in large part thanks to the steadfast determination of its founder Marcelo Gaia. On Tuesday morning, in an LGBTQ-affirming Episcopal church in Greenwich Village, like most New York venues during this week, there was a fashion show.

Tik tok famous clothes