Cassey Ho was getting her roots dyed when she started receiving hundreds of ecstatic messages. In a video clip promoting her song “Fortnight,” Taylor Swift was shown wearing the Pirouette Skort, a flouncy, tutu-style skirt with built-in shorts underneath, that Ho had designed for her athleisure brand Popflex. She knew immediately this exposure — one of the world’s biggest pop stars, flaunting Ho’s design — would be life-changing.
“I am just numb. I can’t even scream, I can’t even speak,” she recalls of the moment she realized what was happening. “I am just dead.” Even though it appeared for literally one second in Swift’s video, that brief moment caused the entire inventory of thousands of skorts to be snapped up within an hour, and a week later, over 10,000 customers had placed preorders for the product (to date, Popflex has sold over 50,000 Pirouette Skorts in total).
Then came the dupes.
The Popflex skort caught the attention of a more ominous group: imitators, or more precisely, companies churning out look-alikes of popular clothing items. Within weeks, Pirouette Skort copies — mesh ruffles, drawstring waistband, pastel colors and all — had flooded the web. More than a year later, they haven’t stopped. And there is not much Ho, who built a fitness empire around her popular YouTube channel, can do about it, even as someone with a large and recognizable platform.
Copycat Pirouette Skorts have been sold on Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, TikTok Shop, DHGate, Temu, Shein, and countless other fly-by-night storefronts that will seemingly disappear as quickly as they popped up. They are cheaper, faster, and shameless; many of the listings do not even show the actual item that is being sold. They simply use Popflex’s copyrighted images without permission, sometimes editing the color of the skort in the photo to fit the listing. In May 2025 alone, Popflex counted 461 listings it believes infringe on its Pirouette Skort design patent, but it’s still a drop in the bucket of the thousands that Ho has encountered just by doing reverse image searches.
“I don’t have the time or the money to go after all of these infringements, all these dupers,” Ho says. “It’s just too much.” Many listings live on, copyrighted images promoting a product of unknown origin and quality.
Temu listings using Popflex images. Image: Temu
Dupes for popular, covetable products are nothing new: for hundreds of years, people have meticulously copied other artists’ work, from forged ancient Chinese art, to licensed replicas of designer ballgowns in the 1940s, to knockoff phone chargers meant to mimic Apple aesthetics. The internet has helped dupes spread like wildfire, so much so that even relatively niche and unknown products — in fashion, home goods, makeup, and tech — likely have a doppelgänger floating around out there. It has never been faster or easier to make and sell a copy of something. What was once relegated to Canal Street is now an industry in and of itself. Some companies seem to operate with the express purpose of copying popular (or even niche) consumer products. And for American shoppers already accustomed to inexpensive products, finding the same thing for less is second nature.
Living among copies of something else is as ordinary an experience as scrolling past three of the same posts, one after another, on any given social media site. The similitude of consumers’ options has even upended certain corners of the legal system, where intellectual property rights holders are trying to fight the speed and scale of the internet with their own — at times flawed — versions of the same. It is dupes all the way down.
Across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and online forums, content creators have built entire personas and brands on the promise of finding lower-cost versions of popular products. This phenomenon isn’t exactly new — for years celebrity and fashion blogs have done something similar — but the dupe industrial complex has taken on a new life in the age of influencer marketing. Grocery chain Trader Joe’s, for example, regularly releases cosmetics that are unsubtle in their imitation of existing, popular products: lip glosses, body washes, lotions, and more with near-identical packaging, concepts, and even formulas to other brands’ products. While the average shopper might not catch the reference, those in the know seek the products out. Content begets more content, a cycle of someone making a video about a dupe, someone else watching it, buying the same dupe, and recording their own review.
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