As I have stated in my last blog, I been on this Compact Challenge, and have yet to buy anything. The excess of money I find myself with has become such a positive thing in my life right now. Two weeks and still going strong. Anyways, I just wanted to update you guys on how the this Compact Challenge is going for me currently.
Over the past few years, I find myself noticing a lot of the styles at the mall so similar to one another. Not to say that imitation of fashion from one another had just occured within the last few years, but I see it at a higher rate than before when I was growing up as a kid. Nowadays, when you go to the mall, almost every store have the same thing for sale, and the style and clothing, designs, etc. all look alike. The only difference? The tag on the back of the clothing has a different brand on it. Since when do stores like Hot Topic, Pacific Sunwear, Anchor Blue, Forever 21, Charlotte Ruuse, and many more sell such similarily clothes? Back then, you could easily distinguish what kind of clothing brand someone was wearing because of the brand's style. However, now you can't really tell the difference if those skinny jeans that girl is wearing is from Forever 21, or Hot Topic.
The reality is that the Fashion industry have become a culture of knockoffs. People copy one another, and in a sense it does help the fashion culture to an extent. People knock-off someone else's ideas and make it to their own, and that's how fashion evolves over time. You take someone's idea and make it better. Then someone take that better idea and make it better, and the cycle repeats itself. That's why you see a trend with all clothing stores following one another.
In Melissa Decker's article on Knockouts of Knockoffs, she talks about the impact knockoffs and counterfeit has done to the fashion industry. SHe discusses that wearing a knock-off or fake replication doesn't really carry the same stigma as it once did. People don't care if it's fake or not anymore, unless it has the brand logo on it. These days, it is so hard to distinguish what is real or fake anymore. For example, when my sister went to Vietnam a couple of summers back, she brought home alot of clothing. Some of them were clothing brand like Gucci, Prada, Versace, etc. I asked her how could you afford all these clothing? I finally realized that they were fake, but if I didn't knew this, I would have never been able to distinguished it. It looked so real, and I probably could pass wearing fakes and no one would know, except for maybe a die-hard fashion expert who pay attention to small details.
So I pose a question to bloggers and readers here. Why don't people care for the real thing anymore?
Sources -
- Decker, Melissa. "Knockout of Knockoffs" Class Reader
- http://vietnam.mijeje.com/?p=70
images
http://images.andale.com/f2/120/118/7948051/1075982073354_7e_1.jpg
http://www.denimblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/girls-denim-jeans-venice-skinny-colors.jpg
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