Professor Susan Scafidi was featured in an article for CNBC to share her expert opinion on the rise of TikTok videos posting fake luxury products.
A major video genre on TikTok is videos on how to find “dupes,” or items on sites like DHGate, AliExpress or Amazon for items that look like Chanel, Gucci, Lululemon, Louis Vuitton and Cartier or other pricey designers. Other videos show how TikTok users actually make do-it-yourself designer dupes; whether that’s sewing and styling shirts to look like they come from Brandy Melville, or actually painting or ironing on Lululemon or Chanel logos to make them look like the real thing.
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Susan Scafidi, a professor at Fordham University and founder of the Fashion Law Institute, said with each new online forum comes a fresh wave of promoting counterfeit items. Of course, the terminology changes — whether that’s “fakes,” “knockoffs,” “reps” or “replicas,” or, in much of TikTok parlance, “dupes.”
“That’s in part because of the evolution of language, and in part an evolution of a design to escape from bots that take down references to counterfeits and increasingly to replicas,” she said.