Unauthorized Authentic over the past few years streetwear fashion has experienced tremendous success and managed to make its way into nearly all fashion weeks. Logos, graphic design and product design of the new brands such as Off-White, Yeezy and Vetements have become an integral part of the success of the firms, providing something of a communication tool, and influenced even the classic fashion brands like Gucci and Balenciaga.
Although this fashion fills Instagram accounts of celebrities and has numerous supporters among “normal” people, who mainly identify themselves with the graphic elements, for the majority of them it remains unaffordable. Thanks to factories in China there is a thriving market with replicas and creative or popular redesigns of products, even whole collections of some brands, running alongside the official market. A network of e-shops tries to sell these products with a note that they are “unauthorized authentic” goods, publishes their realistic reviews on social networks and presents these products through bloggers. While until recently it was a social faux pas to wear pieces with a visual modification of the type of four adidas stripes instead of three (in the spirit of the slogan from the 1990s “the more stripes the more adidas”), anything bearing the adidos, adimas or adibas logo, or the Nike’s swoosh turned upside down, today these reworkings are gaining the status of a creative statement, in some cases criticising overpriced clothing. In response to fake products, the genuine fashion brands started to collaborate with artists and offer an original professional upgrade, so-called bootlegs, or they may even create a collection inspired by fake products.
The Unauthorized Authentic project responds to what is described above. With several examples in the form of photographs, pieces of clothing, fashion accessories or videos it showcases the fantasy in the approach to the production of these items by Asian workers, proponents of so-called bootlegger fashion or designers of large fashion houses. The exhibits include, for example, a photograph of the Balenciaga Triple S shoes with an added Off-White logo, when the manufacturers probably went ahead of time and suggested possible co-operation between the two brands although it did not happen in real time; redesigns of iconic products created by the bootleggers Imran Moosvi (@imran_potato) and Ava Niri (@avanope) or a t-shirt inscribed Guccy from the official collection of the Gucci brand made between 2017 and 2018 inspired by fakes from street shops. Photographs of Vetements fake products which Vetements sold as its own in 2016 in an official “fake garage” in the suburbs of Seoul are also present. To illustrate the whole scene the installation presents several examples of the opposite extreme, when the consumers are enthralled by the original and wearing a replica is not socially acceptable for them. These consumers are willing to invest large sums into clothing with the logo of their favourite brand and even paste it on their own Ferrari. A recording shows a lecture by the leading figure in today’s streetware and founder of one of the most successful brands Off-White and Pyrex, Virgil Abloh, at Harvard University where he concludes that streetwear is a form of contemporary art. All of the positions overviewed above aredisplayed inside a showcase in a project by a curator Monika Čejková and an artist Romana Drdová.
Text by Monika Čejková