Shoe Knockoffs Go Too Far This Time

Cheap imitations of famous designer handbags have been around for a long time, secretly sold in sidewalk shops or hocked on the street. But shoe knockoffs are a more recent development. Check out these Balenciaga heels on the left (which we would never recommend wearing by the way) that sell for over $4,000 and their fake counterpart on the right is available for $99.

Here's the problem, the copycat isn't an illegal manufacturing company that specializes in secretly producing knockoff goods, it's popular shoe designer Steve Madden. How awful is it when a designer blatantly plagiarizes another designer's work? Even though the two labels are eons away from each other in price, reputation, quality and target buyer, it seems really wrong. It might not be so bad if the concept of making a shoe from a bunch of tennis shoe scraps had trickled down the design ladder and Steve Madden reinterpreted it in a different way (designers borrow from each other all the time and hardly any idea is a completely new idea these days), but to use the same colors and details, from the pink and black mesh down to the green buckle, is pretty unbelievable.