How dupes took over the world

Fake designer purses for sale in Manhattan on July 6, 2024. | Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images

When Deckers, the company behind fleece-lined UGG boots, recently took Quince to court over its lookalike boots, it tried to bar Quince from referencing “dupe culture” at trial.

The bid failed, confirming that “dupes” and “dupe culture”, a commercial ecosystem built around providing consumers cheaper alternatives to name-brand products, are cultural phenomena here to stay.

The trial focused on whether Quince’s shearling boots that really, really look like UGGs violated the existing patent for the design. And in a twist, the jury ruled that yes, Quince had copied the UGG design, but the patent over the UGG boot should not have been issued in the first place because the design was too generic to protect. The ruling opened the door for Quince and any other brand to make a similar-looking boot, opening up a new frontier for “dupe culture.”

And the culture is, undoubtedly, thriving. While it used to be embarrassing to own a fake, that’s no longer the case. Today, if you can find a cheaper, knock-off alternative, that’s a life hack.

In our online age, social media and online shopping exist awash in copies, dupes, and knock-off versions of name-brand products. Rather than outright counterfeits, these products carefully step around trademark and copyright rules with the express purpose of offering consumers cheaper alternatives to something a different brand created. It’s become an entire industry, embraced by influencers and companies like Quince.

In her recent piece, “Knock It Off!,” Mia Sato, a senior reporter at The Verge, outlines just a few things that have been duped recently: makeup, Le Creuset Dutch ovens, hand sanitizer, designer perfumes, Apple AirPods Max, Oura Ring fitness trackers, viral phone cases, dishwasher pods, famous banana pudding recipes, Pilates workouts, and the entire island of Santorini.

“We could probably surmise that there will be even more dupes in the future,” Sato told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram, “but I think there are more dupes than have ever existed in the history of mankind right now.”

She joined Sean on Today, Explained to discuss the rise of “dupe culture” and changing ideas of ownership and originality in an era of internet-driven mass consumption.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What exactly is dupe culture? What has it become?

Dupe culture is this idea that the limitlessness of the internet allows you to find a cheaper alternative, a copy, something that is a reasonable stand-in for the thing that you actually want. And it has permeated every industry: guitars, clothing, makeup, food, recipes.

There are dupes for Lululemon pants. There are dupes for Birkin bags, which are incredibly expensive, incredibly hard to purchase designer handbags that go for tens of thousands of dollars. There was a $50 version for sale at Walmart. It was called the ‘Wirkin.’

There are dupes for fancy pots and pans. There are dupes for lip glosses and lip oils and lip stains. There are dupes for vacations, someone was marketing a different island as a dupe of Santorini, right? You can apply this dupe framing to just about anything.

What’s different now is that dupes are kind of just a way of life, in that you don’t have to go somewhere seedy or weird or black market-y to get a dupe. Anything you can think of, dupe culture means that there is a dupe out there somewhere. But it’s walking a line, being very careful not to infringe on things like trademarks or copyright.

And how do you find your dupes? Do you just go to dupe dot com?

Dupe dot com is a thing. Dupe.com, basically, you can copy a URL to any product, plug it into dupe.com, and it will do a reverse image search of the web and find products that look similar. Some of them might be cheaper, some of them might be expensive, but the whole idea is you’re looking for lookalikes.

A lot of modern online shopping actually has all the tools you need to find a dupe. Amazon, for example, just introduced a new feature where you can write out a text version of what you’re looking for, and it will use AI to generate an image of what it thinks you’re describing and then use that AI-generated image to look for similar products. It’s basically a reverse image search.

TikTok has a feature where if you pause a video, it will highlight products in the video and you can click those products and find similar-looking dupes on TikTok Shop. So finding dupes has never been easier because a lot of these features are built into the platforms that we’re using in the first place.

When you talk about copying and pasting a URL into dupe.com or all these reverse image searches, where do we end up on the legality?

That’s sort of the million billion dollar question: What is allowed?

Obviously I’m not a lawyer, but when IP attorneys describe this to me, every, every question I would ask them, they’re kind of like, It depends. When you get down to something like fashion, one expert told me that a lot of it is not protectable. This shirt that I’m wearing, right? It’s like a button-down shirt with a lace pattern. No one should be able to own that specific thing. And just because a fast-fashion company were to rip this off, is there legal grounds to sue them? Maybe not. Just because two products look the same doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s illegal.

And it can turn people against you, right? People feel like they can rip off [guitar manufacturer] Fender because Fender’s the biggest fish. And people feel like they can rip off UGGs because for a decade, it was the boot to have and it doesn’t feel like they’re struggling.

Is that a part of this broader dupe culture that may or may not be peaking right now?

The public’s engagement with dupe culture is endlessly fascinating to me because people have a lot of thoughts. Often, the thoughts are, ‘Of course I’m going to buy a dupe of a Birkin because I can’t afford a $50,000 handbag. If there’s a cheaper alternative, I’m just going to buy that because poor people deserve nice things too, or I shouldn’t have to be mega-wealthy to afford a bag that I like.’ That thinking often colors the dupe discourse.

It gets messy and it gets really heated and emotional, I think, because we’re talking about something that Americans love to do, which is to consume, which is to shop. People get really defensive and protective of what they’re able to buy and the morality of dupes.

The dupe, I think, is never enough. This is my hot take, but I think when you have a dupe, you still lust over the product it’s duping. And in that way, it’s doing the opposite of putting them out of business. It’s actually making them even more aspirational.

I think that modern online shopping has kind of lied to consumers and almost rewired our brains to make us think that there is such a thing that costs five dollars and will last a really long time and is ethically made and looks good. Often, that is not the case. And often, that’s what dupes are.

They give you the illusion of finding something nice or finding something beautiful or something that you identify with, but when you strip away a lot of it, it’s a lie. You get what you pay for. And the cost of things has gone down so much, especially since Temu and SHEIN, these ultra-fast-fashion brands, that I think consumers have forgotten what is literally possible when it comes to cheap and good products. I think cheap and good products do still exist, but not to the extent that we would like to believe.

How did you think when you’re writing your piece, Mia, about where the internet has taken the idea of originality?

I think our current algorithm-driven feeds make it so that copying someone or recreating something is not just easier, but it actually sometimes makes more sense. Think about the way that trends circulate, right? The platforms encourage us to use the same sounds as other people, do the same dances, edit in the same way, pick up on the same formats. They want dupes of the content.

What I was interested in when I was writing this piece was that the textures of the internet, the endless copies and the similar but different creators and the little niches were recreating themselves in our physical world, in the things that we surround ourselves with. If you went home and looked around your house, you probably have a dupe of something. I have dupes of stuff in my house that I didn’t even know were dupes. They’re all over, and sometimes you buy a dupe without even realizing it.