The history of fashion is full of great designers, but it is also plagued by copies. Yet, in between the creative minds that founded or led famous maisons and the chaos of copies produced illegally and of perfectly legal designs that clearly show derivations from other collections, there are some bizarrely fake but interesting products.
They may be T-shirts with fun prints of characters from popular series that people love but that no designer ever considered featuring on their garments or maybe an object of some kind, even an interior design piece with a fake logo. The designs created by Imran Moosvi fall into this category.
The bootlegger comes from the school of thought of Dapper Dan. Known as the hip hop tailor of Harlem, Dapper Dan used to create in the '80s DIY designs from fabrics covered in brand logos such as Gucci or Vuitton. At the time the designer played a dangerously ironic game with power and luxury products/logos. Sued for his bootlegged pieces, after Alessandro Michele at Gucci copied - pardon "homaged" - one of his jackets, Dapper Dan rose to fame again, becoming a Gucci icon and star collaborator.
Moosvi started combining logos after graduating from college and coming up with a Fred Perry polo with a Supreme logo. Things quickly developed and he began customising designs like Nike Air Force One sneakers with the trademark swoosh covered in fake designer prints. Imran's designs gradually became favourites of rappers like Lil Yachty and Tyga and American hip hop group Migos.
Sneakers and jerseys played a big role in Moosvi's first pieces, but then he moved onto logos and monogrammed patterns, and tried to apropriate and reinvent them, posting his creations on his Instagram account, @Imran_Potato.
So far Moosvi has created Jordans with baby heads and arms sticking out; onesies for his "Gucci babies" (plastic dolls); Gucci toilet paper and LV snowboarding goggles, while his jackets and pants with blown up LV logos, part of a capsule collection launched in January, are currently a hit and were spotted on trap rapper Bad Bunny and singer Billie Eilish among the others.
Moosvi is based in New York, but his background – his parents are Indian and Iranian-Indian – prompted him to travel and source bootlegged fabrics in other countries such as Turkey and China, where he is producing his next designs and from where he seems to be posting images of mispelt Supreme products (check out the young girl with the "Suepmre" bag in one of the posts) or the hilarious LV Teletubbies.
Though he would like to move onto other types of customised pieces such as car interiors and furniture, Moosvi doesn't seem to have a huge and structured plan, but he is simply inspired by the things that appeal to him the most visually and by the impact of the monograms he has been using.
What he does is definitely not new and anyone (with some talent for graphics, colours and brand hybrids) could engage in creating their own bootlegged designs. Besides, legally speaking, Moosvi is infringing copyrights using illegal monogrammed patterns for his own creations; last but not least, some of the materials he sourced in other countries may have been produced by exploited people (workers manufacturing fake goods such as counterfeit monogrammed fabrics are often exploited and work in unsafe conditions).
So there are questions behind these pieces, but there is also a key dilemma: design-wise some of Moosvi's creations look more fun than the original ones, especially if you consider collections by Virgil Abloh, current Creative Director of Louis Vuitton's men's collections (who actually seemed to copy cheap items sold on Amazon for his first collection at the French maison) or than the "fake originals" created by some brands like Diesel (remember the Deisel prank?) and make you wonder if Moosvi's custom knock-offs will ever become approved collaborations with powerful brands.
For the time being Moosvi only sells some of his designs on order and to people he has some kind of relationship with, making his creations scarce and desirable in this way and generating a hype around his name.
But Moosvi's designs make you think: if they are more desirable than the real thing, have luxury brands failed and is the power of the logo their only asset rather than the collections they produce season after season? Food for thought, but maybe the time has come for luxury brands to consider resizing their collections and licensing (albeit in a limited way) products. Would that damage the value of the brand or its heritage as it happened with Pierre Cardin? Who knows. At the same time, some of the big players in the fahsion industry would maybe start taking themselves less seriously and that wouldn't certainly be such a bad thing. So, Gucci toilet paper anybody?
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