The Secret History Of Mafia-Run Bootleg Fashion

There’s nothing inauthentic about fashion’s current love affair with fakery. Maybe it’s the zenith of post-irony, but something over the past 11 months has led labels to examine the value of what’s authentic and what’s not. Under Alessandro Michele, Gucci has released its own iterations of bootleg t-shirts inspired by Chinese copies, Vetements has staged a rip-off-inspired garage sale in Seoul entitled “Official Fakes”, artists like Ava Nirui and Heron Preston have appropriated luxury motifs for their work and London streetwear label Palace has emblazoned the hyperreal ‘Placae’ Tri-Ferg logo on a tee in homage to Taiwanese counterfeits. Little over a week ago, Italian streetwear site NSS published an exposé that very much felt like a continuation of this theme. The article detailed the rise to prominence of a brand titled Supreme Italia, also known as Supreme Barletta. The label essentially makes bootleg Supreme – t-shirts, sweatshirts and beanies all emblazoned with an oversized version of the New York label’s renowned red box logo motif. And they do so, technically, within the confines of the law, due to Supreme having not trademarked their logo within the Italy, thus creating a sort of “legal fake,” according to NSS. The same people behind Supreme Italia have also reportedly launched similar labels in the past, including Pyrex Original, which bootlegged Virgil Abloh’s Pyrex Vision. Naturally, the story sparked intrigue within the streetwear community. This was not a nuanced logo flip – the kind that has underpinned the genre’s lingua franca since the very beginning, creating a rich heritage of subversive iconography – but rather a blatant rip-off. Read more at Dazed.