The dupe trend goes viral
Scroll through TikTok for more than a few minutes and the algorithm will eventually show the user a ‘dupe haul’: a young creator holding up a handbag ‘inspired by’ a famous monogram, captioned ‘get the look for less’.
The hashtag #dupe has amassed billions of views, and an entire dupe culture has turned price comparison into entertainment. For Gen Z and younger millennials, buying a dupe is not shameful; it is sustainable and aspirational. It signals taste without the price tag.
The trouble is that dupe has become a marketing euphemism that flattens a legally significant distinction. In common usage, a dupe is simply a product that looks or performs like a more expensive one. But not everything sold under that friendly label is legally a dupe. Some of it is a counterfeit wearing a nicer name.
Legal copy versus illegal copy
Intellectual property law does not protect an idea, a general aesthetic or a product concept. It protects specific, registrable expressions of it: a trademark, a logo, a registered design, a distinctive trade dress or an original creative work. This is what separates the legal copy from the illegal one.
A legal copy replicates a product’s function, silhouette or general style without borrowing any protected sign or design. A skincare brand that reverse-engineers a competitor’s formula and sells it under its own name and packaging is competing, not infringing, assuming no patent covers that formula. A handbag brand that releases a structured tote in a popular silhouette, a footwear label that produces a pointed-toe pump in this season’s trending color or an apparel company that cuts a trench coat along a classic, decades-old silhouette is operating in a lawful, if ethically debated, space, provided none of them copies a specific registered design, pattern or logo.
This is the terrain of ‘reproductions’ and ‘inspired-by’ products that competition law generally tolerates, because trademark and design regimes exist to protect specific expressions, not entire aesthetic categories.
An illegal copy, by contrast, attempts to pass itself off as the original, using the same or confusingly similar logos, brand names, packaging trade dress or protected designs, with the deliberate intent to make a consumer believe, at the point of sale or afterward, that they are buying (or displaying) the genuine article. This is counterfeiting, and in most jurisdictions, including Brazil, it is a criminal offence, not merely a civil dispute. It causes measurable harm: lost sales, diluted brand equity, and, in categories like cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and auto parts, genuine safety risks to consumers who have no idea they are using an unregulated product.
Where does imitation cross the line?
The genuinely hard cases live in the middle. What about a bag that mimics a house’s iconic quilting pattern or hardware shape without using its name or monogram? What about a shoe that borrows a competitor’s unmistakable red sole treatment?
Courts around the world have grappled with exactly this question through the doctrine of trade dress and non-traditional trademarks: when a design element becomes so associated with a single brand in the public mind that copying it, even without touching a single word or logo, still creates confusion or free-rides on decades of investment in that identity.
This is where luxury brands increasingly focus their enforcement efforts, and where the legal analysis gets genuinely interesting: not “did they copy?” but “did they copy the part of the product that consumers use to identify its source?”
Silhouette alone is rarely protectable. A signature colour combination, a proprietary pattern or a distinctive closure mechanism might be. The line is drawn case by case, brand by brand and, increasingly, court by court.
A generation unbothered by the fine print
What should concern brand owners and legal practitioners is not just the volume of copies flooding social commerce, but the cultural shift in how younger consumers relate to the underlying illegality. Dupe culture is forcing a rebranding of the entire category, positioning both legal and illegal products alike as clever consumerism rather than a legally sanctioned harm to someone else’s investment and reputation.
This is precisely why the industry, and the lawyers who advise it, need to talk about this more, not less. Consumer education campaigns, platform-level accountability for sellers who blur the labelling of counterfeit goods and clearer public messaging about what actually happens to counterfeit revenue (it rarely funds independent creators; it frequently funds organised crime) would do more to shift behaviour than enforcement actions alone.
How far can creativity be protected?
The deeper question luxury law must keep asking is where legitimate creative inspiration ends and unlawful appropriation begins. Fashion, by nature, borrows, references and reinvents. IP law was never meant to freeze an entire aesthetic in place for one company’s exclusive use, but to stop one company from profiting from the specific, protectable signals that another spent decades building. Getting that balance right, publicly and consistently, may be the single most important conversation the luxury sector has with the generation currently deciding whether it cares at all.
At Stocche Forbes, Thiago Porto Ribeiro advises Brazilian and international luxury brands, with a focus on business internationalisation, corporate matters, contract drafting and negotiation, copyright matters and design and trademark protection. He can be reached at [email protected].
Roberta Rodrigues Rozenthal has more than 15 years of experience advising clients on data protection, intellectual property and commercial contract matters, with a focus on technology, entertainment and digital law. She can be reached at [email protected].
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