Everything Is a Dupe if You Just Believe
ThoughtScape 002: Nostalgia is full-cream dupe, collabs are skim-milk dupe, straight-up copycatting is 2% milk – 2% legally original, 98% dupe.
Musings of the week
Start | ↓ Chain of miscellanea/thoughts | ✳︎ Finish
↓ Bella Hadid for Miss Sixty, which has tried to revive itself periodically these past 10 years (2015, 2017, 2021), in a supermarket-set campaign, drinking 4% milk.
↓ Yes, I'm still on milk. Is full-fat milk going to be viewed as the 'original' tobacco cigarette, to which the smoking community is reverting because vaping is bad for you, Zyn is even worse for you, and therefore, smoking might actually be just fine for you?
↓ Is drinking oat milk equivalent to vaping?
↓ Groceries by the water cooler in an office, airport bins (the poor man's version: filming product layouts on treadmill beds at the gym) - these otherwise mundane activities that were points of grudge and disdain have become fantasies intended to prompt buy-in. We're duping ourselves into rebranding mundanity as fantasy, as we're not able to afford even the basic mundanity we used to complain about.
↓ The Miss Sixty campaign feels like a completing of the mise-en-scène between the spectacle of the taped banana and Andy Warhol, except no one is having sex in a crowded room anymore, or at least not casually visible or realistically portrayed in pop culture or pop media.
↓ Or allegedly drinking.
↓ Duping is part of the cycle now, the word replacing past tags of bootlegging and copycat claims. Dupe culture exudes a sort of 'IYKYK' energy that fully embraces the dupe, as if finding one is an act of ingenuity rather than being a fashion victim or fake.
↓ Duping hasn't killed the Diet Prada-esque callout culture though, which seems to go on and on and on.
↓ Duping and dupes are just an integral part of the system now, fostered by the “freedom” to share opinions. After all, "More Speech, Less Mistakes" is the new policy by Meta around fact checking, duping Musk's Twitter approach in the bootlicking of the right wing.
↓ The dupe-athon means brands can either invest in risky creativity that might make themselves distinct, or prepare to be proud of being duped by way of commerciality. There's nothing in between.
↓ Duping with intention versus duping in defeat - see the art of duping by Steve Madden, the latest being Steve Madden vs. GANNI.
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