‘Why would you wear a copy if you can afford the real thing?’

With the proliferation of social media, every celeb worth her Manolo Blahnik heels or Chanel jacket boasts her own Instagram account these days, where every look she dons, be it to the charity gala red carpet or the grocery run garners a zillion hits. The downside of all this publicity is of course the fact that what a designer has conceptualised over many a sleepless nights, from the sketching stage to the final stitch on the wow-inducing one-off piece is now easily replicable by any roadside darzi with a keen eye. Tahiliani is very vocal on this subject. “This sort of blatant replications affects designers both in terms of money and is an infringement on your creativity,” he fumes. “Unfortunately in India there seems to be no value for intellectual property rights and I suppose that is great luxury in a country that is this poor, but having said that, this kind of duplication of bad quality speaks volumes to me as an individual. Firstly, let me say this, that people who value quality and originality would never buy a copy. However, that is a very small minority of people in Delhi and surprisingly there are people with vast amounts of money and inordinate wealth who still go for the copy, which I don’t understand. To me it is a reflection that they don’t value themselves. Why would you wear a copy and not the real thing if you can afford it?

“The real thing has a name because of what they have done and therefore there is an expertise – a Chanel jacket shoulder is a Chanel jacket shoulder, you may choose to wear a similar design from a brand that does fast fashion, but it is never going to feel the same as a Chanel. So, it tells me that if you wear copies you either don’t value yourself or that there is some problem, particularly if you can afford it, but if you can’t then it is different. So, of course, there is a financial consequence of people wearing copies but for me the much greater danger is and I have seen it with my own eyes, when people look at someone wearing a copy and they are unable to tell because they are not conversant enough with the product, that it is a copy and therefore they start thinking that a bad quality copy is the original – to me that affects our reputation; that affects the kind of power that the brand might have or the perception of the brand and to me that is a much, much more dangerous consequence in the long run.

“Obviously, we do different things to counter it. One is our fit, which is very difficult to copy; we also do a lot of layering in the processes, which most copiers would not even understand. We employ little techniques so that people in the know will know it is the real thing and will also know when it is not.”