The well-known Louis Vuitton print, or references to it, can be seen just about everywhere: of course on fake LV handbags. But also on socks, scarves, stickers to decorate your mobile phone with, underwear, fabric, plastic carrier bags, hairpins and so on and so on.

A couple of days ago in the Guangzhou metro, I saw this woman wearing her LV inspired sleeves. These loose sleeves are worn mostly by women, and small children, over their coat sleeves. I guess they’re meant to keep the coat clean and whole. People wearing them are often engaged in activities involving dirt and grease (like streetvendors), and small children are of course crawling and climbing all over the place, including rather filthy floors.
So anyway, this woman is wearing loose sleeves that I associate with low income labour, yet sporting a motif that refers to one of the most ridiculously chic brands in the world. (Even though it’s not an exact copy: it says LS, not LV and the shapes that make up the pattern are not very precise replicas of the original LV shapes.)
Encounters as these fuel my curiousity about the cultural meaning of the act to copy from the Chinese perspective. I hope to address this later on in this blog.

My reflection in an LV shopwindow in Xiamen/November 2009

Tags: copy, Guangzhou, imitation, light, me, shanzhai, visual language

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 01:33 and is filed under omnivorous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.