Saint Laurent Really Tried It With This $3,490 Forever 21 Knockoff

If you follow fashion shows as closely as we do or take regular strolls through your average fast fashion retailer, some things will start to look...familiar. Coming across the occasional knockoff when you're out shopping is more of a given than a surprise, especially when you consider how closely "being inspired" and "just appreciating" a design detail or silhouette can verge on pure copycat status. But blogger Nicolette Mason brought some Hedi Slimane foolishness to our attention today that flips the script in a really confusing way. Silmane's Saint Laurent Paris is currently selling a dress (and a wide variety of other stuff) covered in tubes of lipstick — the design is practically a ctrl+c, ctrl+v copy of this Forever 21 dress (and if you're wondering what came first — xoJane included the Forever21 version in a shopping roundup from 2013. The Saint Laurent one is from Fall '15). And it costs a little something north of Forever21's version — $3,490 versus Forever 21's $23. One should acknowledge beforehand, though, that a lipstick print is neither the most unique or innovative print on the market and there have been a lot of variations of the design floating around since basically forever (see here and here). But the similarities between these two are uncanny. When we've come across things like this in say, Zara or H&M, it's been treated as both a curse and a blessing. A curse for the designer, because copying an original creation down to the buttons is never a good look, but also a blessing for those of us who can't afford to shop at the luxury level, because now we can blend in with the same crowd. But in this case, it's hard not to wonder if the industry is just trolling us with this knockoff that's going in the other direction.