Western society inherited from Plato the most popular concept of copying, that "everything is a copy" (also known as mimesis). Heidegger would later say that mimesis equals copying a presentation — “all copies are made and produced” quoted Boon — and the parodying of something in a manner. How’s a bag then the imitation of an idea?

Perhaps it has something to do with our concept of luxury. Boon showed an original 1927 Louis Vuitton ad with this delicious sales pitch: “The trunks that last a lifetime… is French but LOOKS French… not only IS the finest but APPEARS the finest.” The idea of an "essential" LV outward appearance is complicated, a sameness not easily differentiated between a real Canal Street stall with fake product and the faux Louis Vuitton stall (with real product) installed outside the Brooklyn Museum for their Takashi Murakami retrospective (the Japanese artist famously re-made the LV monogram in "super-flat" technicolour). Outsourced manufacturing muddies it further — is the Louis Vuitton bag really French? LV artistic director Marc Jacobs is American, after all.

¶ 9:55 PM