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“Dupes” —fashion and beauty lookalikes, but not counterfeits— are all the rage with Gen Z. Is there a lesson here for content creators threatened by ChatGPT?

HEARD OF DUPES?

They’re inexpensive, alternative, well, duplicates of popular premium/luxe products. Alternatives, not copies. Real dupes don’t copy logos or other super specific details. That’s what makes them legal.

LEGAL. AND POPULAR.

Dupes are big, but dupe content is huge: #dupe has 3.5b views on TikTok alone. (That’s a b.) People like seeing them, and people aren’t shy about buying them, either: in one survey, more than 65% of Gen Z-ers said “they’d bought what they’d consider a fashion dupe in the last year.”

AND DUPES AREN’T specific to fashion.

There are beauty dupes too. Most are “products that aim to deliver a similar result, such as Elf Cosmetics dupes for Charlotte Tilbury foundation or Clinique Black Honey lip gloss.”

QUALITY? YEAH, THAT doesn’t matter.

When it comes to dupes, “it’s not about longevity,” says an ex-Amazon exec. “It’s about finding an outfit for Coachella or to post on social media.”

ONE WAY BIG brands can protect themselves? Loosen the scarcity.

Official collabs with mass market brands like Uniqlo and H&M work. But so does simply developing multiple price points for different demographics, or just making more affordable options for younger customers, according to Gen Z.

SOME BIG BRANDS are doing exactly that:

“Brands killing this for Gen Z are Heaven by Marc Jacobs and Diesel. Both… are really in tune with Gen Z audiences, and understand what/who they like to see,” says one Gen Z shopper.

OK, WHAT’S THE point here?

There’s a lesson in the popularity of dupes for everyone in the content game. Zoom out: trained on the world’s output to date, what even is ChatGPT, if not an infinite, automatic way to duplicate original, human output?

A LOT OF creative types are sweating over ChatGPT, Midjourney, and the like.

But the fashion and beauty dupe story playing out on TikTok rn should give human content creators some optimism: despite their popularity, dupes aren’t replacing high quality fashion items and expensive beauty products. They’re augmenting them.

A COUPLE OF issues ago, this newsletter quoted a tweet about ChatGPT that “went hard,” as the kids say.

It went: “you deserve to be replaced by AI if your skills are so lacking that a group of programmers can create an AI that can do your job better than you.” But the tweet went on to affirm that there’s a class of creatives that will never lose their gigs to AI.

THIS IS TRUE.

Dupes are proving it. Stay with me. US$50 woven bags on Amazon are not putting Bottega Veneta out of business. If anything, they’re raising the Jodie bag’s profile. The luxury brand made US$1.7b in 2022, a record. Likewise, ChatGPT won’t put high quality human creators out of business either…

…EVEN THOUGH WE are on the precipice of a “post scarcity economy.”

Last issue, I wrote that we’re about to enter a completely new world, one where all sorts of “economic goods” (fancy economics speak for “things you can sell”) are about to become super cheap, or even free. The simultanous popularity of both mass produced, low cost dupes and high priced, high quality originals suggests a similar bifurcation will happen with content and services: today’s writers, animators, musicians, and visual artists will either be (a) sitting at the controls of an assembly line, ie., pumping out content by prompting ChatGPT, Midjourney, and the like or (b) sitting at a workbench in an atelier, ie. conceiving and creating custom, “handmade” content.

Gen Z’s dupe fixation —and the world’s insatiable demand for authentic, high quality luxury goods at the same time— suggests there’s room in the market for both.

More:

Gen Z loves dupes. Is that bad news for luxe fashion? »»

Written by Jon Kallus. Any feedback? Simply reply.