In the age of TikTok, hyperconsumerism has taken on a new guise as a pair of £7.00 platform Crocs. They’re not officially branded Crocs: they’re being sold on a popular wholesale website and there is no mention of the Croc brand anywhere in the listing title or description. However, if you traverse the hundreds of customer reviews underneath the product, you will run into something like the phrase “fantastic dupe” time and time again.
The term “dupe”, shortened from “duplicate”, has been circling the internet since the early 2010s and originated as a slang term in the makeup and beauty community. Used to designate a cheap or affordable product that imitates a more expensive, high-end product of the same ilk, “dupes” have long existed to provide solutions for making makeup more financially accessible.
In recent months, “dupe” has become an umbrella term, extending from the makeup realm to encompass most categories of products. The dupe following has become increasingly obsessed with finding the most seamless imitator of every possible item: Gymshark leggings from Amazon, Le Creuset casserole dishes in Aldi, and most Le Labo scents can be sourced in Zara too. It’s an intense community of scouring and sourcing, mirroring devoted fandoms such as the Harry Styles troupe in terms of social media detective skills. It takes these teenage girls on TikTok countless hours of testing and trying, ordering and sending back, to find these beloved imitators.
Despite the grave seriousness held by the members of the dupe community, on the other side, we have the “DOOP” trend. These die-hard duplicate detectives have started to be lightly teased by the comedic side of TikTok. Teens saunter around supermarkets (usually Walmart) picking up items that slightly resemble trending (usually overpriced) products and state “[insert brand name here] DOOP”. “Skims DOOP” yelled one girl, holding up a Target dress that could easily be adorned with a Kardashian-approved label.
The point that this ridiculous social media trend proves is that it isn’t necessarily difficult to find these cheap imitators. Every supermarket, drugstore and online wholesale site has its version of any trending product at any given time. Marketing teams consist of young people with strong online presences, seemingly able to deconstruct and re-organise key elements of social media trends in a way that creates loopholes for what are essentially counterfeits. The formula for creating dupes has been refined with such skill that it’s so easily recreated now.
Take Primark as a prime example. In every single Primark haul/ store walkthrough TikTok or Instagram Reel, there will be at least one mention of a dupe. The ‘Trending Now’ section of Primark, always located at the front of their stores, contains these temporary trends almost solely inspired by social media. Primark has a very weak social media presence as a brand, despite its status as a household name: in fact, Primark relies mainly on word of mouth and good PR and has always been reluctant to fall back on advertising of any sort as its peers continue to do.
Therefore, Primark is at the forefront of dupe utilisation. Near-enough replicas of micro-trends that sweep most social platforms appear in this ‘Trending’ section and we seem to only know this through the videos posted on these very platforms via paid partnerships with social media influencers. This back-seat approach of marketing to a chronically online audience works extremely well; Primark has been able to solidify its status as a beloved high-street store amongst heaps of competition and this is largely in part due to its shameless replicas.
This phenomenon eerily mirrors the theories of German philosopher Walter Benjamin. His ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ predicts a future where art is consumed through mass reproduction and the ‘aura’ of singular authentic artworks is lost, told through the context of the emergence of photography in the 1930s.
Although it may be quite a leap to compare the works of Benjamin with the craze surrounding Primark clutch bags, the destruction of the aura within fashion is plain to see in this example. As Benjamin demonstrated in his essay, the dissolving of the aura does not have an overtly positive or negative impact on art, but it most certainly increases accessibility to it.
Duplicates (despite the straightforward dictionary definition of the noun) exist to imitate, not directly copy. Yet, these “dupes” bear no significant differences to make them stand out as their original creations. Therefore, authenticity for singular products has been entirely discarded to champion convenience. The ease of being able to purchase an exactly cheaper version of something you want, in a society of consumerism for the sake of consuming, takes the biscuit for most consumers without a doubt.
The thing that stands out about this displacement of authenticity is the distinct lack of opposition to it. Despite ongoing fast fashion debates that question the moral obligations when it comes to shopping sustainably, this seems to be almost forgotten when it comes to obtaining cheaper versions of hot trendy items. It may come down to a revelation that all mass production processes are inherently exploitative, or potentially the ridiculous and rising prices of basics puts off many in a particularly gruelling cost of living crisis. However, one thing is clear: it becomes harder to put much faith in costly decisions in an era of expendability and distrust.
