Buying a Knockoff of My Own Dress: An Educated Roast (actual fire used for Scientific Purposes)

So I wake up one morning to a DM box full of lovely girlfriends informing me that one of those mass manufacturer cheap fast fashion clothing sites has recently been advertising my 15th century red reconstruction for sale using my likeness. mine with the

dress

, you know the

dress

. that if you watched the two part creation series you know it took over 250 hours to craft and was now somehow selling for the nice price of 40.98 which is not even half of what I spent on the materials, but the issue of the evident lack of ethics in this effort will be discussed.

We don't hear about this all the time. Artists have their work taken without permission left and right and no one really has the power to do anything about it or at least if anything is done to get the images or if you're lucky the

actual

product was removed it's just a matter of time before the next offender rears his ugly head, thus repeating the never-ending exhausting cycle, which is why it's 6:30 in the morning and I'm staring blankly at the bright red double-digit number under the dress I spent a month on. and a half painstaking hand stitching but apparently that was what the retailer was promising when posting my picture of said handmade dress and my first thought was good My first thought was that they at least had the courtesy to crop out my face out of courtesy or maybe out of cowardice, oddly enough, he wasn't angry at all because, you see, I smelled meat and did what any other crafty online creator would do when presented. juicy fresh content chance i bought the dress it says it will take 10-20 days to arrive which means it probably came from china so if this isn't a scam i can't wait to see what kind of eyesore it gets deposit in my mailroom a fortnight from now, but of course it wasn't that simple it's the 20th and there's no sign of the package.

I'm starting to think this might have been a scam. A strongly worded letter to the company later. surprised, i

actual

ly got a reply informing me that there were issues with the manufacturing and that the product was indeed on backorder that apparently no one bothered to inform the buyers about, but that's ok, my favorite part of this correspondence was the offer of a further discount on the price I paid this offer was conditional on me keeping the dress and not returning it which I found very funny because it is not my return of the product that they should be so afraid of, it is what they i'll do when i'm left with the products i should be most concerned about so let's find out what happened when the dress finally arrived 49 days later i think this is finally the package so let's see what kind of monstrosity decides to emerge from this package. cotton in all its polyester synthetic glory here is what is supposed to be a 15th century dress, well I have to give you one thing, one of the things I was upset with myself about in the original dress was the fact that i forgot to put a waist seam when i think clearly now the original portrait had a waist seam at least they have a waist seam in this we have to get closer to this because you need to behold all the glory here this is literally worse quality than one of those Halloween costumes you get at a Halloween store that you wear for one night and is supposed to be billed as an actual wearable dress, wait, I mean first. everything has splinters of wood chips literally kind of stuck in the fabric so i dont know if you can see i will try to get as close as i can the quality of the material in the first place is the biggest disappointment so what you can see , I don't know if you can see, but I mean, is there a label here that tells me what it is, but okay, there's a label, usually a brand that has nothing to hide will tell you exactly what percentage? of the material it's made up of what fiber content this isn't even telling you it's not telling you what percentage cotton it is so it could be zero percent cotton and 100 percent polyester and I can tell you we can actually go and try this ok so it actually caught

fire

which suggests there's some natural fiber material in here and it smells a bit like burning paper which again suggests there's some natural fiber cotton material in here they're not lying about cotton however as you can see cotton when burned will start to shred into ash thats not happening here in fact the edge has been completely melted back into plastic meaning most of the cotton content fiber of this material is synthetic plastic basically which is why these synthetics are so uncomfortable to wear because if I mean just imagine wrapping yourself in plastic wrap that's not very comfortable it doesn't breathe and it's very sweaty or so, apart from the poor quality of the material, we can take a look at the finer details of this, I mean in terms of design.

I think they have this situation here, which is that this strap is attached to one side, it's not attached to the other side, it's meant to, I think, mimic the gown that she was wearing under the original dress, which is supposed to be a separate garment. it's not this but the way it's designed i just want to say it just doesn't feel right because this isn't meant to be a thing i mean the problem with these mass manufacturers is when they produce clothes they are producing clothes based on from an image based on I mean someone's stolen Instagram photo when designers when artists when seamstresses and tailors and actual artisans design clothes that they are designing with the human body in mind, not a pre-existing photograph in mind so original clothes are obviously made for people and they're made to be worn and they're made to be flattering and they're made to last potentially because they're well-crafted and who wants to waste craftsmanship how can you see this this it just wasn't thought of logically there's no logic to having this here if we look closely at the build the build was obviously done very hastily i dont want to blame these seamstresses for this because they are probably underpaid and overworked and running very fast according to manufacturer demands so here you go stuff i mean this just came out of the package but i know they're dropping threads you've got threads that haven't been cut properly so you've got do you know there are extra loose threads hanging from things?

You have things like this neckline happening up here, where I mean the seams are uneven. It's completely crooked. It's not even a well finished edge. the little bit of cutout that opens it up, we can see that it's unlined, there's no structure in this bra, which means it's not going to be very flattering on the figure because all you have is this single layer of knit material very loose elastic synthetic between your underwear and the world which is generally not the best way to create a nice beautiful shape on a human figure again this is obviously working from a photograph of my dress so there is i means the bodice is not shaped, obviously there is no care in examining a real dress, let alone a real period dress, or doing research to study the patterns of period dresses, so not even they will come close to something that I did because I actually took the time to do my research to find out what makes these dresses the shape that they are and how they behave and ultimately what makes them look like a really beautiful medieval dress that any outsider can cut a square like yours. an airplane blanket and make a dress like this.

One other thing I can point out is that the length of the stitches is something you may be looking for if you're looking to identify whether or not your garment is. The input is good quality, looking at your stitch length can also be a very revealing thing because if your stitches are like nine miles long they are increasing the stitch length so they can sew faster and make the garments occur more rapidly while I mean if you look at a lot of 19th century Victorian clothing still outlives us by 150 years today the stitch lengths are so small they are often just a millimeter in length and that creates a really strong seam the The fabric to which it is attached is attached so finely and so firmly that it will not unravel and will not come undone or tear as easily as if one of these stitches were to come undone or if one of these stitches were to catch on something, since it is more likely because there is more length between each stitch in the hole than i mean the whole garment falls apart back to looking at the dress as a whole i mean just furthering the missing stitch craftsmanship, there are just raw edges that are blatantly overlocked where you wouldn't see this on a genuinely well made garment because again the seam can pull once you get one of these pulls then you just have a raw edge.

I don't even know what this is. I have no words for what is happening. It doesn't make any design sense here because it wasn't thought of logically, it was thought of based on copying an image, and again right here on the front of the sleeve, you've got this horrible overlocking situation here with some random loose threads because I I mean who wants to be wordy, am I okay, cool, cool? So we've taken a close look at this floor but I have two forms of dress and I have the original dress so let's put them in some forms and see what the real differences look like so here we are ladies and kind people we have a small sizing issue not the fault of either dress obviously this is supposed to be a standard retail size small which is not my size and of course this dress wa made for me if you don't know me hi hi i have a severe case from scoliosis which has completely deformed my upper body so all the dresses I make for myself that I finish no longer fit my way of dressing and I no longer fit any kind of standard human size obviously that dress is not going to be made for my weird measuring situation and this dress is not going to close as it should but more immediately of course what we notice is the obvious lack of attention to historical pattern cutting. which of course is what makes this dress this dress this dress look like a costume so as you can see they just went for the standard bodice waist seam skirt situation whereas this dress does i based actually on a pattern of some tunics that were discovered from i'm going to try it really i'm going to try scandinavian people hair toss greenland and just based on the number and shape of those panels i covered this shape in my way of dressing so i made the draping myself this is not exterior transmission obviously a word for word historical pattern but it is based on the original forms that potentially would have existed in the medieval period so as you can see we have a seam coming in here we have a seam coming in here there's basically like 11 panels in this dress um in this one we've got front seam we've got the back it's all one piece so the bodice is just three It's pieces, that's what gives this amazing shape, that's what gives the whole medieval period that quintessential medieval fit. beautiful shape so i probably already mentioned this dress i bought for 49 this dress cost me about 200 just in materials this is a wool blend i needed 11 yards so that's even for a wool blend which is cheaper than a simple wool that I certainly couldn't afford about 20 a yard plus the yard of silk that was needed for the bottom sleeve.

It wasn't cheap here, not even the materials could be bought for forty bucks like this, and of course, in addition, this dr. That took about 250 hours to build by hand, obviously if you do it by machine it's going to be significantly reduced, probably about a hundred hours, maybe if you multiply that by a living wage, well, I'm going to do some math then. a minimum wage of 15 and that's like an absolute basic minimum, just labor multiplied by 100 hours, which would be roughly a machine-sewn dress, maybe she doesn't machine sew much, so I don't know, it's fifteen hundred bucks plus the cost of materials ok if you are going super budget if you are actually doing this with cotton maybe you could spend 150 on materials which is 1 hundred and fifty bucks hey guys that is why I don't take commissions just because that's how much this dress would have cost hypothetically at an absolute basic minimum wage.

I don't even know how you get the materials that on the cheap are using significantly less material. To be fair, this dress probably only

used

about three yards of fabric. There's a lot going on with this dress, there's absolutely no silk, there's no lining in this dress, so all of this, the silk sleeve lining in this dress is not apparent in this dress, I get it, it's a cost-saving thing, There are also no under sleeves on this dress. the only additional material they use is this strip of white that is supposed to mimic the change i haven't even priced the change on this because it wasn't built for this project andthen of course there are the closures there's the edge that I didn't even factor in that cost so basically what I can tell you is making clothes is very expensive clothing is an investment it's something that when done right , when it's made with decent, good quality materials, and when it's built to last, it will last you're a significant part of your life as it has throughout history, so historically I want to say I'm going to go into a full rant here historically this is how fashion worked before fast fashion before we literally got destroyed listening to our environment with the textile industry being one of the most destructive industries in the world right now basically the point of this experiment was to expose the reality of how much clothes cost, how much work goes into things, how much materials cost, and the quality that can result from them, versus the trade-offs that are made in terms of ethics in terms of workmanship in terms of material quality in terms of material durability to get something that's not flattering won't last you but it's cheap makes me really angry so how did we get here? how did we get to the point of exploiting people and literally dressing ourselves in plastic that gets shredded and then ends up in landfills and then destroys the environment where we went wrong how people dressed in history before we ended up here and how can we get back there maybe the clothes took time there was.

I mean, if we go before machinery before sewing machines, it took time to make because I had to do everything by hand. I mean everything, everything took time to make from the weaving of the material. It was made by hand which would have cost a lot of money. He was so valuable, in fact, so valuable that even in the high fashion elite, such as the court, he wore beautiful silk brocades. expensive silks were very valuable and there was no point in wasting them because they were very expensive so their fabric was expensive their labor was expensive because it took a long time to do this obviously I mean the exploitation of garment workers it's nothing new.

Garment workers throughout all of history have an unfortunate history of never making enough to live alone because the amount of time it takes to produce a single garment by hand is pretty daunting, so at some point we lost sight of the fact that that the craft of clothing is supposed to be an investment and I'm not saying you know that clothing should only be for the elite because people wore clothes all the time. Throughout history, all kinds of people have worn clothes. I think we have become so dependent on fast changing fashion. There are so many different styles of clothing that appear each year and then disappear the following year, like those plain skirts from 2012. now they don't look like where did they all go they're all in landfills surely people aren't cutting them into other things because who does that today is no longer part of our daily routine, but whereas if you go back in history, I can point to this is the 1880s this is the 1860s this is the 1750s this is the 16th century these periods of time they have very specific silhouettes because fashion changed at a more gradual rate because people paid more for their clothes clothes cost money you weren't just going to buy something you wear it for two years and then you throw it away you go buy something you wear it until which either wears out and you cut it into rags or something or if you're fashionable you cut it up get up and become the fashion silhouette because the fashion silhouette is always based on what it was before so big skirts are in this decade ada and by the next decade people will start sweeping them up and fixing them up again, it's all the same. kind of the starting point of the dress it's just you're doing different things with the same source material if that makes sense nowadays we're like plain skirts one season then the next season maxi dresses are in style next season so it is for example, how do you turn a plain skirt into a long dress?

You can not. You have to go to h m and buy new clothes. So many clothes are now available in the world and exist right now, so there is no shortage of clothes, obviously you. you know you go to a charity shop but these charity shops don't necessarily keep everything that is donated sites like poshmark and d-pop and you know clothing swapping facebook groups there are so many clothes out there there's no reason why we should be producing clothes at this rate so yeah now I feel like I have a responsibility now that there are a lot of people following me on the internet for the fact that I do things with clothes to pass on this ability to recognize craft to pass on the basic skills to work with clothes, whether or not you want to start making your clothes yourself, which is fantastic. also so you can take things from thrift stores and flip them so you can pick up a piece of clothing that's falling apart maybe take it apart take a pattern and then make a new one that's cool too or if you're just here to learn how to take care of your clothes to mend things to keep so they last as long as possible so you don't poke a hole in your shirt or something and think it's ruined now I can't you listen to it and throw it away that's not productive if you read any 19th century sewing manual They go on and on about the importance of darning, the importance of mending, and they stress the reader that they're supposed to be teaching people because Many of these are instructive on how to recognize weak spots in fabric, so rule number one is darning a patch before it becomes a hole. we have completely lost that skill of fixing our clothes everyone should know how to sew it's not a girly thing it's not a delicate thing like floofy it's a basic practical technical skill to be able to repair and maintain the things you use for what is my rant that was the purpose of this whole experiment is to hopefully shed some light on what's going on in the garment industry, now the question arises as to what to make of this and actually I'm not sure if I did.

I still haven't fully decided that it's not going to be thrown away. I'll have to figure out how to put it to functional use or I may just keep it in this dress form as a little sanctuary for the poor, presumably underpaid, ab

used

person. Who had to do this? It saddens me. Okay, so this is what happens. I am not a bespoke dressmaker, fashion designer tailor or small business retailer. I am a historian doing unique reconstruction projects for learning

purposes

. The things I post online are not products I can go and buy myself, so having images of my work taken and used while morally a bit insulting doesn't really hurt me as a business, in fact it has arguably benefited me, but what if you sell the work you post online and massive large scale manufacturers who claim to offer the exact same product at a fraction of the cost actually hurt your business, well you could hypothetically avoid this entirely by not posting images of your work online , but in today's internet visual culture, understandably, this is not an option that people don't buy into, what they can't see, what they can't drool over and imagine themselves taking into their lives and making them the nice instagram. imagine your instagram feed your facebook page your youtube channel whatever the tick tock is the free content you create and produce becomes the most direct way to reach and engage an audience on a personal level and eventually becomes in the most profitable effective means of advertising to your highly engaged leads brief interlude on running online businesses aside, i am not qualified to provide legal advice if you are one of the hundreds of artists and designers this site is intended for only those who they have also had their work stolen and potential damage done to their business, personally I don't plan on taking legal action because it is very time consuming and I am the sole owner of my business and I am probably better off directing my energy towards creating new things instead of going after corporations in a likely futile and extremely expensive international legal battle. utterly worthless pieces of real junk that provide no real value to anyone's life the freelance but highly trained dressmaker who works at your dining room table slashing her prices in an attempt to compete with the manufacturer en masse and thus not paying your rent is usually not going to have the time or money to continually fight these battles, however Angela Jarmin of Fancy Fairy Wings and Things is one of the rare artists to actually take legal action against design infringement and recently , one of her wing designs has been stolen straight from a kardashian even though she literally posts video tutorials she is also teaching people how to make her wings without violating copyright so she is currently taking legal action against this , so I will put his Instagram and YouTube channel below if you want to follow the process and the result, but while the artists and di Signers themselves do not appear to have been very successful in the past in stopping the theft and mass distribution of their designs.

There are people who can ultimately change the behavior of fashion manufacturers. The consumers. The mass manufacturer just works to meet demand and if the demand for these products is there, I mean if we continue to put money into this industry

buying

these products, they're not going to go away and the problem will perpetuate, but how are you supposed to that we know how we are supposed to tell what brands they are? genuine and we will send you the high quality and preferably ethically made item shown on the website and whose brands have just pulled the pretty f pictures from instagram feeds only to send you a cheap imitation that is unflattering and not it is made to last.

Google and one must know which reviews are affiliated with or sponsored by the brand in question and how that may or may not affect the review. More simply, you can get started by simply taking a look through the website, a branch that it prides itself on. Since its manufacturing process has nothing to hide, it will usually disclose these points on the about page or FAQ page. You can also use practical thinking, at what scale does the brand operate. Do they stock products indefinitely or are they things produced in smaller quantities that are eventually sold out on a full scale?

Large operating companies tend to constantly produce large quantities of new products and trade off quality, work ethic and environmental impact to keep up with demand, hence the term fast fashion, watch prices and do a bit of Math calculation aside from the cost of materials how many times can you fit what you think is a living wage into that price and do you think it takes enough hours to make a garment of that kind of complexity do we really need to buy affordable new dresses every month if it means the unidentified unknown person who made those dresses is overworked and underpaid finally we as consumers can learn to recognize, appreciate and demand craftsmanship this is certainly something that will require some training as which is not something that we are told about and that we should worry about, but as we saw during the examination of the previous dress h here are certain things we can pay close attention to the quality of the materials used and look at the labels if necessary to what percentage of the fabrics used are made up of synthetic materials you can look closely at how the garment is put together how the stitching looks, whether it is whether or not it is lined and how the pattern cut flatters or doesn't flatter the human body the fast fashion issue of craftsmanship in the fashion industry and how we as consumers can select a stylish wardrobe without being so destructive or Going completely broke is a vast topic that I will no doubt explore further soon because now I need to find something to do with this dress.