Kim Kardashian West and fast fashion: Is there something shady brewing?

It’s no secret that what the Kardashian-Jenner family wear influences the wardrobe choices of a generation of women and men. Roll your eyes all you want, but it’s true.

If Kim Kardashian West wore cargo pants and flip flops, within a matter of days the streets would be filled with cargo pants and flip flop combinations.

But this isn’t an investigation into if this phenomenon is real—we know it is—but rather the ‘how’ of the matter.

Where there’s supply, there’s demand, which is why fast fashion retailers have been quick to take “inspiration” from the designer pieces the Kardashian-Jenner family wear and reinterpret them at a much cheaper price point.

And while it seems just a case of fast-moving production lines, a recent Instagram post by Kardashian West has thrown up a few questions as to the realities of copycat designs.

KKW took to Instagram to share a picture of herself in a gold dress designed by her husband Kanye West. In the caption that runs alongside the post Kardashian West notes that West made the look for the couple’s trip to Miami last year but the reality star never wore the look and decided, famously, to go with her neon wardrobe instead.

“Going through old fitting pics & found this gold look that Kanye made for me for my Miami trip last summer (I went w the neon vibes instead),” Kardashian West wrote, adding, “P.S. fast fashion brands, can you please wait until I wear this in real life before you knock it off?”

Mere hours after KKW’s image surfaced on Instagram, fast fashion retailer Missguided posted a replica of the dress with the caption: “The devil works hard but Missguided works harder @kimkardashian you’ve only got a few days before this drops online.”

The post has since been removed but the brand wasn’t fast enough for self-appointed fashion watchdog Diet Prada, who grabbed a screen shot and put it to their fans that there might be more going on behind the posts than KKW’s tongue-in-cheek chiding of fast fashion labels.

“Hey Kim, we’re onto your little game. Just when you thought nothing would top the fake-out “confession” of Kendall‘s Proactiv ad, the Kardashians do it again. @kimkardashian posted a picture of herself in an old dress Kanye made for her, presumably under his Yeezy label, with a pithy caption pleading for fast fashion brands to let her wear the dress before knocking it off,” Diet Prada wrote.

They continued, “Three hours after her post, it popped up on quick-turn retailer @missguided , who has entire website sections dedicated to kopying the Kardashian style. Last year, Fashion Nova famously dropped their own versions of Kylie’s custom birthday looks mere hours after she posted them. The lack of transparency around celebrity endorsements is a big problem facing social media. We think we smell a rat. Dieters, is this a thinly veiled collab, or does Missguided have a secret atelier of magical elves making stretchy dresses round the clock and shooting them on Kim K doppelgängers? Lol.”

Fans of Diet Prada were quick to point out the Kardashian family have long had endorsements with Missguided, Kourtney Kardashian being one of them.

But it’s not just Missguided who are aligned with the Kardashian-Jenner bunch: Pretty Little Thing, Boohoo and Fashion Nova all use the family to endorse their clothes. Fashion Nova even have a whole section dedicated to Kylie Jenner wearing their pieces while Missguided had a whole section of their site dedicated to KKW dupes. After the aforementioned Instagram post was taken down, so too was that section of the brand’s website.

And as Diet Prada points out, dupes for Jenner’s birthday looks, a mini dress by Peter Dundas and a Swarovski-encrusted strapless romper by La Bourjoisie, were up on the retailer’s website in a matter of hours after Jenner wore them (and presumably at much more accessible prices than Jenner’s originals).

What’s more, the Missguided quip—“The devil works hard but Missguided works harder”—may have actually been in reference to a tweet by Twitter user @KashaunaJ who appropriated the saying to point out that the 21st birthday dupes on Fashion Nova landed on the platform just hours after the family celebrated Jenner’s birthday. A coincidence? Hardly.

According to The Guardian, these alignments are lucrative for all involved—in sales for the retailer and in fees for the Kardashian or Jenner promoting them. An Instagram post by Kylie Jenner commands US$1 million while Kardashian West will set a brand back US$750,000. If that seems steep, it’s not, considering Google trends reported that Fashion Nova was the most-search brand in 2018 coming ahead of Louis Vuitton, Versace, Givenchy and Gucci.

“Boohoo’s UK sales rose by a third to £180m in the last four months of 2018, with its strong performance credited in part to a successful collaboration with the eldest Kardashian daughter, Kourtney, who has long championed the brand. (Sales increased 95 per cent at Pretty Little Thing, and 74 per cent at Nasty Girl in the same period.),” The Guardian’s Sirin Kale noted.

What exactly is going on behind the closed wardrobe doors of these fashion fast brands? A sartorial head’s up? Quick-handed fashion elves, as Diet Prada puts it, or something far more lucrative and deceptive?

#Ad and #sponsored don’t seem to cover the relationship that might be going on between the family and these fast fashion retailers. Perhaps it’s time for a new disclosure hashtag.

This story originally appeared on Vogue.au

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