When the hustle is high fashion, and the joke’s on all of us.
–Katya Moorman
In my social feeds this summer, I’ve seen:
Your basic flip-flop sandals by The Row for $690 (sold out on their website).
A striped cotton beach towel by Prada for $1,050.
And Balenciaga?
Their latest cult buy is the Marché Packable Tote—a scruffy, crinkled plastic bag in all but name, available for pre-order at a mere $995. It’s made from Dyneema, a material often described as bulletproof—which is exactly what I look for in a tote bag, said no one ever. Originally developed for industrial use and commonly found in tents and high-performance gear (glamping, anyone?), Dyneema is still a plastic—specifically, a petroleum-derived polyethylene that’s notoriously difficult to recycle due to its specialized processing.
This isn’t even new territory for Balenciaga. The brand has been running this bit for a while. For those in the #IYKYK crowd you may remember the $1,790 “trash pouch” from 2022? Or the $2,145 leather riff on the iconic Ikea shopping bag from 2017?
We are living in an era where luxury has become performance art, where visual discomfort signals cultural capital, and where the more mundane—or deliberately hideous—the item is, the more cachet it holds. As long as it’s wrapped in irony and served to those who get the reference, it’s considered chic.
Perhaps no moment captured this shift better than Vetements’ 2015 debut of the now-infamous DHL logo T-shirt.
Priced around $300, it sold out instantly and set off a wave of think pieces and Instagram takes. Was it satire? Critique? A prank on the fashion elite? Perhaps any of those.
But mostly, it was product. A product that launched Demna Gvasalia into the spotlight and paved the way for his appointment as creative director at Balenciaga — where he scaled that same ironic, self-referential playbook into a full brand identity.
Now, luxury brands are doubling down. They’re selling shoes that resemble hospital slippers, bags that look like garbage sacks, towels priced like rent. The items themselves often carry no craftsmanship, no heritage, and certainly no practicality—but that’s not the point. The point is the message behind the purchase. You’re not buying something beautiful or well-made; you’re buying access. You’re proving you get the joke.
And so, inevitably, comes dupe culture.
Scroll through social and you’ll find endless lists of so-called perfect dupes—affordable lookalikes of high-end pieces, many mimicking the same absurdity or calculated blandness as the originals. There’s the Walmart Birkin. The $20 version of a Loewe tank. Knockoffs of the flip flops, the bags. These dupes are not just about affordability. They’re about fluency—about knowing what to copy, and why. Wearing one doesn’t say “I wish I had the real thing.” It says, “I’m fluent enough to play the game on my own terms.”
But here’s the thing: the game doesn’t change just because the price does.
Dupe culture, for all its air of rebellion, mirrors the very system it pokes fun at. It thrives on the same references, the same hunger for status-through-style, the same gatekeeping-through-aesthetic. Whether it’s the original or the copy, both run on the premise that style is a code—and value comes from being understood.
Meanwhile, the cost—environmentally and ethically—remains unchanged. Whether it’s $690 flip-flops or $7 knockoffs, it’s often the same exploitative labor, the same synthetic materials, the same pipeline of environmental damage. The price shifts. The impact? Not so much.
What we’re witnessing is luxury in its emperor’s-new-clothes phase. A culture so deeply self-referential that a plastic bag becomes a status symbol—as long as it’s accompanied by a logo and a wink. Everyone claps because everyone’s afraid to say they don’t see it.
There is no real critique here. There is only product.
If there’s a way forward, it doesn’t lie in choosing the dupe over the designer, or vice versa.
It lies in stepping outside the cycle altogether—in asking not what something costs, but what it offers, in refusing to applaud simply because we recognize the punchline. It’s the equivalent of walking away from the cool kids’ table, realizing, as Gertrude Stein once put it, that “there is no there there.” Because whether we spent $20 or $2,000, if all we’re left holding is a plastic bag, the joke really is on us.
And yet, beyond the cascade of trends and outside the irony economy there exists something else.
People building something else entirely—designers working in true collaboration with artisans, not just to borrow steal their aesthetics but to share credit and profits; material innovators crafting fibers that regenerate the earth rather than pollute it; and a generation of young creatives who refuse to mine virgin resources when there is already so much beauty to be salvaged, reshaped, and reimagined.
They’re not trying to get in on the joke.
Instead they’re designing a future that doesn’t need a punchline –with more beauty and less bullshit.
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