There is also another app that’s making waves in the customisation scene. Thanks to platforms like Depop, buying customised footwear and clothing is easier than ever. Through this, designer reworks have grown in popularity. The world of reworks is a blurry one; much like a plain AF1, the item has started off as a legitimate branded item, be that a blanket, piece of jewellery, whatever. Essentially, the item is altered, changing the state from the original design into something new, and effectively rendering it as something the designer never intended it to be. Put blankly, an illegitimate design.
This process has complicated roots in another fashion faux-pas – bootlegging. Over the years there have been a number of cases where creatives have been sued by big brands for their takes on their clothing. A recent example was between Fendi and Dapper Dan . The designer owned a Harlem Boutique where he would kit out local gangsters, gamblers, sports stars and musicians in custom pieces adorned with monograms and patterns taken from luxury fashion houses. The approach was hailed as one of the first examples of luxury streetwear, but the houses weren’t ready for that conversation. In the 1980s, the boutique was regularly raided by the police, and then a 1992 Trademark Infringement win for Fendi shut the store down for good.
Dapper Dan’s luck changed in 2017, when Gucci sent a suspiciously familiar looking jacket down the runway. After a huge (and valid) social media fuss, Gucci admitted that the garment was “inspired” by Dan’s work, and eventually invited him to work on a capsule collaboration with them in 2018.
Now, there’s an obvious difference between creating a product that appears to belong to a brand by way of their logo or through use of their design language, and simple customisation, but according to The Sole Supplier data, the most commonly searched for custom sneaker is the “Dior Air Force 1.” This is obviously a sneaker that never existed, with only a Dior Jordan 1 having surfaced and gone to market. Bennett notes that whilst painted Dior customs were amongst her top sellers, she’s actively moving away from doing them as she feels that they’ll tarnish her as a designer.
Similarly, custom Louis Vuitton AF1s have also proven popular. These were later brought to life by the late Virgil Abloh, and a single pair fetched over $350k at auction in February 2022. It goes without saying that this price tag is hugely out of reach for most people, and in a way, customs allow for one-off or limited pieces to be much more accessible to the average consumer. Sandhu and Whybrow even credit Abloh for the growth of the custom scene – not only because of his DIY approach to design, and his rule of only changing something by 3%, but because his collections and collaborations inspired consumers to want to buy things that you didn’t see every day. Interestingly, a lot of the critical discourse around Abloh’s work, particularly when it came to the 3% rule, was centred on a lack of originality.
