AI has amplified fashion’s knock-off problem. Now what?
It’s more than just online dupe finders designers need to be wary of.
By Marjolijn Oostermeijer
Dupes have been around forever. But their pace and scale are accelerating rapidly. Scrolling on SHEIN, you’ll find copies of Chopova Lowena’s carabiner skirt and Simone Rocha’s pearl egg clutch. Prefer The Row’s woven Mara flats or Bottega Veneta’s Intrecciato bags? Amazon, Walmart and countless high street brands all have their own copies. Your chosen knock-off doesn’t even have to be synthetic trash anymore, thanks to the rise in grey area luxury brands like Quince and Italic, which imitate designer goods in quality and looks. On TikTok and Substack, people exchange their best dupe discoveries. And if you can’t find it there, simply take the product image or URL of your desired designer piece and paste it in the search bar of Dupe Finder, which uses generative AI to scrape the web for knock-offs.
Kari Fry, founder of the LA-based label SUBSURFACE, is used to being duped. When one of her dresses went viral, the garment quickly sold out, and countless knock-offs emerged in its place, she says. “I watched the dupes sell out, while I couldn’t fulfil our orders. Even worse was seeing one of our own retailers buying into one of our dupes at a lower price point. I felt like everyone was making money off my design but me,” she says. Last year, a new phenomenon emerged. “I started seeing brands take our imagery [to sell dupes of her product] and use AI to change our model’s face to an AI-generated face.” She continues, “I imagine AI has made it easier for companies to produce knock-offs. But what I’ve been thinking about recently is AI’s influence in buying and trend forecasting. Buying has turned towards a data game, and I think that’s frightening.”
How AI made duping easier
Where imitation used to be the sincerest form of flattery, AI ensures you don’t have to be noticed to be copied. Some of today’s models scrape a sea of publicly available content for trend potential. Players like H&M Group and Inditex are already familiar with this, framing it as trend forecasting. Elyon Adede, founder of the crochet and knitwear brand Elexiay, has seen “a troubling shift where fast fashion platforms use AI to identify trending designs and flood the market before independent designers can even build momentum.”
“What concerns me most is the speed and scale at which generative AI can replicate design language,” Adede continues, “compressing months of creative development into seconds of computational output.” In an ongoing lawsuit, SHEIN has been accused of “scraping data from non-Shein sources to identify relevant trends,” as per The Fashion Law, using algorithms “to identify products for Shein’s suppliers to manufacture.”