Visitors to the new show at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology Museum can be forgiven for thinking they're seeing double. They are. A wool bouclé 1966 Chanel day suit opens the exhibition alongside its twin, a licensed copy. Faking It: Originals, Copies and Counterfeits is on at the FIT through next spring and surveys fashion's rich history of facsimiles. Aside from Louis Vuitton and Gucci handbags, the displays – 100 objects from the museum's permanent collection – concern early and mid-century fashion. Little has changed over the years, except for the sophistication of the tricks designers employ to identify their work as authentic – and the ones counterfeiters wield to deceive.
As long as there has been fashion, there have been copies, the catch-22 of successfully promoting one's work. Chanel herself understood this – always eminently quotable, she airily proclaimed that an idea dies the moment it's born. We take fakes and copies of all kinds for granted and, unless we're the ones being duped, often accept them. Take, for example, front stoops decorated in fake greenery dusted with fake snow. You could even consider the friendly mall Santa to be a licensed copy.
As early as 1903, as the FIT exhibit demonstrates, designers had developed tactics to guard against fakes. A voluminous purple velvet dress by Charles Worth from that year features details on its label to help authenticate its provenance. By the mid-teens, Lucile (the professional alias of Lady Duff-Gordon) was among the only designers in the burgeoning American fashion industry to participate in widely viewed lifestyle newsreels and offer a sneak peek at her upcoming looks; over in Paris, couturiers were busy fending off copyists who made duplicates of their high-fashion styles for the cheaper (often American) market. Advance Parisian models were "shrouded in secrecy to avoid 'leaks' to the public," the book Hollywood Before Glamour details.
Some copies were leaks of a sort, sold as licenses to department stores and manufacturers around the world, fully authorized, but many were not. Jeanne Lanvin licensed copies of her garments to be made by Bergdorf Goodman for its clients; Madeleine Vionnet was among those who lobbied for copyright of her creations (she even affixed her thumbprint to labels). In the grey area between, people posing as retail buyers infiltrated design salons to copy for their clients, and legitimate but venal buyers acted as double agents for manufacturers who wished to copy pieces in lesser quality – these women became skilled at memorizing details of looks as showroom models walked to and fro.
In Couture Culture, art historian Nancy Troy explores how art and fashion are, at least for the purposes of reproduction, closely related industries. After a three-year restoration, the Victoria & Albert Museum's Italian Cast Courts reopened last week with its collection of scale plaster replicas of such giants as Michelangelo's David proudly on display. They don't pretend to be genuine.
Nor, for that matter, does Tim Jenison's recreation of Vermeer's The Music Lesson. The documentary Tim's Vermeer follows Jenison's laborious project to repaint the work with the same modified camera-obscura process he believes the Dutch master used. He undertook the years-long task not to forge but to understand whether Vermeer's luminous paintings were born of mystical talent or inventive technique. Some in the clannish art world criticize Jenison's sleight of hand because they feel it misses the point – which is the end result. The synthetic replication of art duplicates nothing of the original's magical quality, of its inner soul.
In The Connoisseur's Dressmaker, his marvellous essay about the short-lived design house of Augusta Bernard (a master technician of bias cut), fashion scholar William DeGregorio quotes a 1933 interview in which Bernard explained why she did not "feel so anxious about [copyists]. I know the mystery of my own dresses; how difficult they are to reproduce without losing the charm of their very individual spirit, cut, sense of proportion. So I feel sure that women of taste will always understand the difference between a real dress adapted to the personal silhouette … and the cheap, badly made reproduction that has nothing to do with the original."