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

So one morning I wake up to a DM box full of lovely friends informing me that one of those cheap, fast fashion mass-manufacturing sites has recently been advertising the sale of my 15th century red reconstruction using my image with the

dress

, you know the

dress

. which if you watched the two-part series, you'll know that it took over 250 hours to make by hand and was now somehow selling for the sweet price of 40.98, which is not even half of what I spent on the materials , but on the topic of the obvious 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 any power to do anything about it or at least if something is done to get the images or if you're lucky the

actual

product is removed, it's only a matter of time before the next offender rears its ugly head, thus repeating the exhausting, endless cycle, so it's 6:30 in the morning and I'm staring blankly at the bright red. double-digit number under the dress, I had spent a month and a half painstakingly hand-stitching, but apparently that was what the retailer was promising when posting my picture of said handmade dress and my first thought was, well, my first thought was how at least they had the courtesy to barely crop my face, courtesy or maybe cowardice, oddly enough, I wasn't mad at all because, you see, I smelled meat and did what any other crafty online creator would do when presented with the possibility of fresh and juicy content.

I bought the dress and it says it will take 10-20 days to arrive which means it probably comes from China so if this really isn't a scam I can't wait to see what kind of monstrosity is deposited in my mail room within fifteen days, but of course, it was not that simple, it is the 20th and there is no sign of the package. I'm starting to think this might have been a scam. One strongly worded letter to the company later, which surprises me, I

actual

ly received a response informing me that there were problems. with manufacturing and that the product was indeed on back order, which apparently no one bothered to inform buyers, but that's okay, my favorite part of this correspondence was the offer of an additional discount on the price I paid.

This offer was conditional on me keeping the dress and I didn't. return it, which I thought was really funny because it's not me returning the product that they should be so afraid of, it's what I'm going to do to them when I'm left with the products that they should be most worried about, so let's find out what happened when the dress it 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 here she is in all of this this is definitely not cotton in all its synthetic polyester glory this is what it's supposed to be It is a dress from the 15th century.

Well, I have to give you something. One of the things that made me angry with myself about the original dress was the fact that I forgot to put a seam in the waist when I now think clearly about the original portrait. it had a waist seam at least they have a waist seam on this we have to dig into 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 like one night and this is supposed to be billed as an actual dress that you can wear, wait, I mean, first of all, it's literal, like wood splinters, like caught in the fabric, so I don't know if I can see, I'll try to get as close as possible.

The quality of the material, first of all, is the biggest disappointment. So what you can see, I don't know if you can see it, but I mean, is there a label here that tells me? what it is, but it's okay, there is a label, usually a brand that has nothing to hide will tell you exactly what percentage of the material is made up of what fiber content, this doesn't even tell you what percentage of cotton This is so which could be zero percent cotton and 100 polyester and I can tell you that we can go and test it well, so it actually caught

fire

, which suggests that there is some natural fiber material in here and it smells a little bit like burning paper. which again suggests there is some natural fiber cotton material here, they are not lying about cotton;

However, as you can see, the cotton when burned will start to shred to ashes, which is not happening here, in fact the edge has just melted completely. in plastic, which means that most of the fiber content of this material is synthetic plastic, basically, which is why these synthetics are so uncomfortable to use because, if I mean, imagine wrapping yourself in plastic wrap which is not very comfortable , it doesn't breathe and it's very sweaty, so putting aside the poor quality of the material, we can take a closer look at the details of this, I mean, in terms of design, you have this situation here, which is that this strip is attached to a side it is not attached to. the other side is meant to imitate the robe she was wearing under the original dress which is supposed to be a separate garment, not this but the way it is made, it just doesn't fit right because this is not intended to be one thing, I mean, the problem with these mass manufacturers is that when they produce clothes, they do it from an image based on, I mean, someone's stolen Instagram photo when they are designers, artists, seamstresses, tailors and real crafts. people design clothes they design with the human body in mind, not with a pre-existing photograph in mind, so original garments are obviously made for people and they are made to be worn and they are made to be flattering and they are made to last potentially because they are well made and who wants to waste craftsmanship.

As you can see, this just wasn't thought through, logically, there's no logic in having this here if we look closely at the construction, the construction obviously. it's done very hastily, I don't want to blame these seamstresses for this because they are probably underpaid and overworked and work very fast according to the manufacturer's demands, so here you go, I mean this is off the mark. the package, but the threads are already coming loose, you have threads that haven't been trimmed properly, so you have extra loose threads hanging off of things, you have things like this neckline happening here where I'm talking about the seams. just uneven, it's completely wrong placed, it's not even a properly finished edge, it's just overlocked and glued to the edge when you open it, we can see that it's not lined, there is no structure at all to this bodice, which means it's not .

It's going to be very figure flattering because all you have is this single layer of very loose stretchy synthetic knit material between your underwear and the world, which is generally not the best way to create a nice, beautiful shape on a figure. human once. Again, this is obviously working from a photograph of my dress, so I mean there's no shape on the bodice, there's obviously no attention to examining a real dress let alone a real dress from the period or making a research to study the patterns of dresses from the period, so they won't even come close to something I've done because I actually took the time to do research to find out what makes these dresses the shape they have and how they behave and, ultimately, what makes them look. like a really beautiful medieval dress, anyone can cut a square like an airplane blanket and make a dress like this.

Another thing I can point out is that the length of the points is something you can look for if you want to identify it. Whether your garment is of good quality or not, looking at the length of your stitches can also be very revealing because if your stitches are like nine miles long, they increase the stitch length so they can sew faster and produce the garments more quickly. . While I mean, if you look at a lot of Victorian clothing from the 19th century, it still survives us today 150 years later, the stitch lengths are so small that they are often only a millimeter long and that creates a really strong seam in the fabric. , whatever it is. attached to is adhered so thinly and firmly to itself that it will not come unstuck and will not rip or tear as easily as if you unfastened one of these stitches or if one of these stitches gets caught on something, as it is more prone to do so. because there is more length between each stitch in the hole than I mean, the entire garment falls apart when looking at the dress as a whole, I mean furthering the point of lack of 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 seams can pull once 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 here. Has no sense. sense of design because it wasn't thought through logically, it was thought out based on copying an image and again, like here on the front of the sleeve, you have this horrible overlocking situation here with some casual loose threads because I mean. Who wants to be ordained? I'm right? Great, great, so we've looked a little closely at this floor, but I have two ways of dressing and I have the original dress, so let's put this on some shapes and see which one is the real one.

The differences look so here we are ladies and Kind people, we have a little problem with the size, which is not the fault of any of the dresses. This one is obviously supposed to be a standard size small, which is not my size and of course this one. The dress was made for me if you don't know me Hello Hello, I have a severe case of scoliosis which has completely deformed the upper part of my body, so all the dresses that I make for myself and that I finish no longer fit my shape of dress and no longer fits any kind of standard human size, obviously that dress will not be made according to my strange measurement situation and this dress will not close as it should, but most immediately of course what we notice is the obvious lack of attention to historical pattern. cut which of course is what makes this dress and this dress and this dress look like a costume, so as you can see they just went with the standard bodice waist seam skirt situation, while this dress in I actually based it on a pattern of some tunics. that were discovered in I'm going to try, I'm really going to try, Scandinavian people, hair tossing, Greenland and just based on the number and shape of those panels, I covered this shape on my dress, so I covered it myself.

Obviously it's not a word for word historical pattern, but it's based on the original shapes that potentially would have existed in the medieval period, so as you can see, we have a seam coming here, we have a seam coming here, they're basically like 11 panels on this dress, um, on this one we have the front seam, the back seam is one piece, so the bodice is only three pieces, that's what gives it this amazing shape, what gives it throughout the medieval period that medieval form par excellence. it fits a beautiful shape so I probably already mentioned that I bought this dress for 49, this dress cost me about 200 in materials alone, it's a wool blend, I needed 11 yards so that's even for a wool blend wool that is cheaper than a simple wool. which I certainly couldn't afford at about 20 a yard plus the yard of silk needed for the sleeve underneath here wasn't cheap even the materials could be bought for forty dollars like this and plus of course this dress cost about 250 hours of manual construction, obviously if you do it by machine it will be reduced significantly, probably around a hundred hours, maybe if you multiply that by a living wage, so I'm going to do some calculations, I'm going to use a minimum wage of 15 and that's like an absolute basic minimum, just labor multiplied by 100 hours, which would be a machine sewn dress, maybe I don't machine sew much so I don't know, it's fifteen hundred dollars plus the cost of materials , it's okay if You're going to have a big budget if you're actually making this with cotton, maybe you could spend 150 on materials, so a hundred and fifty dollars.

Hello friends, this is why I do not accept commissions, because yes, that is what this dress costs. hypothetically it would have cost an absolute basic minimum wage, I don't even know how they get the materials, so cheap, they are using much less material. To be fair this dress probably only

used

about three yards of fabric, there is a lot involved in this dress there is absolutely no silk there is no lining in this dress so all of this the silk lining of the sleeves of this dress is not evident in this dress I understand it is a cost saving thing there is no under the sleeves in this dress nor is it the only additional material that The use is this strip of white that is supposed to imitate the change, which I have not even put price because it was not built for this project andthen of course there are the closures, there is the edge that I didn't even take into account. at that cost, so basically what I can tell you is that making clothes is really expensive.

Clothing is an investment, it is something that when it is well made, when it is made with decent quality materials and when it is made to last, it will last a significant part of your life as it did throughout history, so historically I mean I'm going to rant here historically this is how fashion worked before fast fashion before we are literally destroying our environment with the textile industry which is one of the most destructive industries in the world Right now basically The goal of this experiment was to expose the reality of how much clothing costs, how much work goes into things, how much materials cost and the quality that can be obtained from them versus the trade-offs that are made in terms of ethics in terms of workmanship. of workmanship in terms of quality of the material in terms of durability of the material getting something that is not flattering will not last you but it is cheap makes me very angry so how do we get here?

How did we get to the point of exploiting people and literally dressing ourselves in plastic that is shredded and then ends up in landfills and then destroys the environment. What were we wrong about? How did people dress in the story before we ended up here and how can we get back there? Maybe the clothes took time. I mean, if we go before machinery, before sewing machines, it took time to do it because you had to do everything by hand. I mean everything, everything took time to make from the weaving of the material that was made by hand.

It cost you a lot of money, it was so valuable, in fact, so valuable that even in the elite of high fashion, like the beautiful silk brocades worn at court, there are like pieces everywhere on the front of the garments, just pieces shameless because the fabric, especially those expensive silks, were enormously 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 make this obviously I mean the exploitation of the garment workers is nothing new. Garment workers throughout history have an unfortunate history of never actually earning enough to live simply because the amount of time it takes to produce a single garment by hand is quite daunting, so in At some point we lost sight of the fact that artisanal clothing making is supposed to be an investment and I.

I'm not saying you know that clothes should only be for the elite because people wore clothes throughout history, all kinds of people wore clothes. I think we've become so dependent on the rapid change of fashion that there are so many different styles of clothing that appear every year and then disappear the next year like those mullet skirts from 2012 that now don't look like where did they all go? Are they all in landfills? Surely people don't cut them on other things because who does that nowadays? It's just not part of our daily routine anymore, but if you go back in history you can identify this is the 1880s this is the 1860s this is the 1750s this is the 16th century these time periods have very specific silhouettes because fashion changed at a more gradual pace because people paid more for their clothes, clothes cost money, you weren't just going to buy something, you wore it for two years and then threw it away, you went to buy something, you wore it until it wore out and you cut it into shreds. or something like that, or if you are fashionable, you cut it and make it into the fashionable silhouette because the fashionable silhouette is always based on what was before, which is why big skirts are fashionable in this decade and in the Next decade people will start sweeping them away.

Pick them up and stir them up, it's the same kind of starting point for dressing, you're just doing different things with the same source material, if that makes sense nowadays we're like mullet skirts one season and then maxi skirts the next season . Dresses are in style next season, so it's like turning a mullet skirt into a maxi dress. You can't, you have to go to hm and buy new clothes, so many clothes are already available in the world and exist right now. So there's no shortage of clothing, obviously, you know you go to a charity shop, but these charity shops don't necessarily stock everything which is donated sites like poshmark and d-pop and you know, clothing trade Facebook groups, there's so many clothes.

There's no reason why we should be producing clothes at this rate, so yes, I feel like I have a responsibility now that there are a lot of people following me on the Internet because I make things with clothes for a pass. about this ability to recognize craftsmanship to pass on basic skills for working with clothing, whether you really want to start making your clothes yourself or not, which is fantastic, absolutely do it whether you want to modify clothes that already exist to make them more of your style or more. towards today's fashion that it's also cool to be able to take things from thrift stores and turn them inside out so you can take a garment that's falling apart, maybe take it apart, take a pattern off of it and then make a new one that's also cool or if You're just here to learn how to take care of your clothes, how to mend things, how to maintain them so that they last as long as possible, so that you don't put a hole in your shirt or something and think that it's already ruined.

I can't use it and you throw it away, that's not productive if you read any sewing manual from the 19th century, they talk over and over again about the importance of darning, the importance of mending and in a way they emphasize to the reader who is supposed to do it. be teaching people because a lot of these are instructive on how to recognize weak spots in fabric, so rule number one is darn a patch before it turns into a hole, if something turns into a hole, it's like if you were paying. pay attention to your clothes, we have completely lost that ability to fix our clothes, we should all know how to sew, it is not something feminine, it is not a delicate and loose thing, it is a basic practical technical skill to be able to repair and maintain the things you wear , so that's my rant, the purpose of this whole experiment is to hopefully shed some light on what's going on in the clothing industry.

Now the question arises what to do with this and I'm actually not sure. I haven't completely decided that I won't throw it away. I'll have to find a way to figure out how to put it to some functional use or I'll just keep it in this dress as a little shrine to the poor, presumably underpaid and poorly treated person. Who had to do this? It saddens me. Okay, so this is what I mean. I am not a bespoke dressmaker or bespoke fashion designer or small retail business. I am a historian who does unique reconstruction projects for learning

purposes

, and I do not actually sell the stolen photo items.

The things I post online are not products you can buy from me, so taking and using images of my work, while morally insulting, doesn't actually hurt me as a business; In fact, you could say it has benefited me, but what if? you sell the work you post online and mass-scale manufacturers who claim to offer the exact same product at a fraction of the cost are actually hurting your business; Hypothetically, you could avoid this entirely by not posting photographs of your work online, but in today's internet visual culture, this is understandably not an option. People don't buy what they can't see, what they can't drool over and imagine themselves having in their lives and turning them into the pretty Instagram picture that your Instagram feeds to your Facebook page. your YouTube channel, whatever the tick, the free content you create and produce becomes the most direct way to reach and engage an audience on a personal level and ultimately becomes the most profitable means of advertising for your highly interested potential clients brief interlude on how online business works aside, I am not qualified to provide legal advice in case you are one of the hundreds of artists and designers this single site addresses who have also had their work stolen and possible damage ca

used

to their business.

Personally, I don't plan on taking legal action because it's time-consuming, and as the sole owner of my business, I'm probably better off directing my energy into creating new things rather than chasing corporations in a probably futile and extremely expensive international legal battle. This is precisely what gives these companies the power to continue stealing people's work and perpetuating unethical labor practices to continue producing completely useless real pieces of garbage that add no real value to anyone's life. The independent but highly skilled dressmaker who works in her dining room. The table that reduces its prices in an attempt to compete with mass manufacturers and therefore does not pay rent will generally not have the time or money to continually fight these battles.

However, Angela Jarmin, of fancy fairy wings and such, is one of the few artists to actually take legal action against design infringement and recently one of her wing designs has been stolen directly from a Kardashian even though She literally posts tutorial videos teaching people how to make her wings without violating copyright, which is why she is currently taking legal action. Against this, I will put their Instagram and YouTube channel below if you want to follow the process and the result, but while the artists and designers don't seem to have had much success in the past in putting an end to this situation. theft and mass distribution of their designs, there are people who can ultimately change the behavior of fashion manufacturers, consumers, mass manufacturers only work to meet demand and if the demand for these products exists, it is I mean, if we continue to invest money in this industry

buying

these products they are not going to go away and the problem is going to perpetuate but how are we supposed to know how are we supposed to distinguish which brands are genuine and we will send you the high quality item quality and preferably ethically manufactured shown in the image? website and which brands just pulled the pretty pictures from your Instagram feeds only to send you a cheap

knockoff

that's unflattering and not made to last.

This involves some digging, unfortunately, you could dig a little deeper by searching for product and site reviews on youtube, blogs and in the general Google sphere, and one must be aware of which reviews are affiliated or sponsored by the brand in question and how that may or may not affect the review. More simply, you can get started by just taking a look. Through the website, a branch that is proud of its manufacturing process because it has nothing to hide will usually make these points known on the About or FAQ page. You can also use practical thinking on what scale the brand operates on.

Watch them produce new designs every week or month. Do they stock products indefinitely or are they things produced in smaller quantities that eventually sell out completely? environmental impact to keep up with demand, hence the term fast fashion, look at the prices and do a little math, aside from the cost of materials, how many times can you include what you think is a living wage in that price? It takes enough hours to make a garment of that kind of complexity. Do we really need to buy new affordable dresses every month? If that means the anonymous, 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 it is not something we are told about and need to worry about, but as we saw during the previous dress review, there are certain things that you can lend Pay close attention to the quality of the materials used and look at the labels. If you need what percentage of the fabrics used are composed of synthetics. You can see up close how the garment is made. What the seams look like, whether they are or not. lining and how pattern cutting flatters or doesn't flatter the human body the fast fashion topic of craftsmanship in the fashion industry and how we as consumers can create a stylish wardrobe without being so destructive or completely broke is a large topic that i will definitely explore further soon, for now I need to go and figure out something to do with this dress.