While you watching the Golden Globes red carpet and drinking and tweeting and wondering why Angelina Jolie looked so, well, constricted, the dressmakers at Faviana were sketching what some of the most famous actresses were wearing. That is, the actresses who wore things that the masses wouldn’t find too challenging, should they want to wear exact replicas of the Globes dresses themselves. And I say dressmakers and not designers, because they are merely copying the dresses we saw on Sunday, not creating new designs, which is truly problematic for designers who invented these looks and have no Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act to spare them this cheapening of their creations. Faviana, which makes prom and cocktail dresses, even has a section on their website devoted to knockoffs (they call it “DRESS LIKE A STAR”), with pictures of celebrities wearing dresses that they’ve knocked off as best they could for a price tag of $500 or less.
The label has the ability to knock these things off so quickly that they were able to show samples of their Globes knockoffs on the Today show this morning, just four days after the award show. On Today, models posed in knockoffs of dresses worn by Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba, Charlize Theron, and Stacy Kiebler, all of which will hit stores in six to eight weeks and cost under $500. Many of the choices, the announcers concurred, would be just dandy for prom (except for Theron’s gown, which is too sexy for a high-schooler). But do teenagers, or grown women, really want to wear a dress that is so blatantly identifiable — so that when people look at them, they think, “she looks like a knockoff of Angelina Jolie”?
Evidently, they do want that, or Faviana would not be investing so much time, money, and website real estate in the effort. After all, this is a time when we celebrate not only wearing things that look exactly like what celebrities wear, but also people who look exactly like celebrities and therefore get to become a quasi-celebrity themselves. You know, why should women bother projecting their own identities to the world through clothes or looks? What a societal burden that would be. It’s much safer to mask ourselves behind celebrities’ watered-down presentations of themselves than bothering with originality.
