Handbags Anarchy

Supposing I can afford one (!) I'm pretty sure I wouldn't buy an original designer bag. I feel guilty everytime I buy a thing for a fraction of the price of a designer item, I can't imagine what would happen with a real fill-with-the-name-of-your-favorite-designer piece.

On the other hand, I've never bought a fake designer bag as well. Beyond all the legas implications of buying a fake, I really think there are so many good quality, well made unbranded or vintage products at affordable prices that I really don't need to buy a cheapy copy of something a poor child had sewn somewhere just to please a broke I-would-but-I-can't fashionista.

I mean, I can covet a certain design, but in the end...it's only a bag, I can live without it!

Starting from questions like "could I hand crochet a designer bag?" and "would people - in a weird way - believe it is real because it had the logo on it?", in 2006 San Francisco based artist Stephanie Syjuco created the Counterfeit Crochet Project website.


Stephanie had already worked on issues of piracy and bootlegging as they apply to today's globalized economy; the Counterfeit Crochet Project started both as a critique of a political economy and a mere crochet project, with the purpose of solicite crocheters to hand counterfeiting designer handbags.
She declares:

It seems to me that ingenuity and inventiveness lays at the heart of those who decide to make things for themselves. Crafting is overlooked, even denigrated as a viable "vernacular" form of expression. I view the impetus to handmake something in an era of mass production a personal and perhaps even political act, a way to give yourself agency to create and produce in an age of standardization and retail.

and again

most of us "ordinary people" can't afford such things, and some even knowingly buy knock-off products to sublimate our desires. If you take the logic one step further, and actually make the item yourself, you are in a sense taking the situation into your own hands without giving a single penny to the company brand. They have excluded you anyway, by keeping their prices astronomically high.

She calls all this "handbag anarchy": the final results are both homages and lumpy mutations made by different people with a different sense of creativity. Definitely something totally different from a classic knock-off product!