I lived for a year in a city where it is very easy to find knockoff designer goods, and nice ones too. Even though the bag or shoes is fake, they're real leather and well constructed. Or even if the coat is a knockoff it's well tailored and a nice durable coat that will last for years. In that city, for every one person wearing real designer stuff, two were wearing knockoffs.
I lived in an area where it was very easy to find affordable tailoring services too, so I have quite a lot of my clothes custom tailored to flatter my body type.
I'm not ashamed of that. Sometimes I like the style of a piece but there's no way I'd spend 1000+ bucks on it. So I have some purses, shoes, coats, and miscellaneous clothes that are knockoffs of designer things. I don't go for stuff with big obvious branding, like bags stamped all over with monograms, I think those are tacky. If the stuff I buy has any faked labels at all, they're small and subtle. I don't buy stuff so I can pretend to afford Gucci, I just buy classic understated styles that I like but I don't want to spend thousands on. I want to look stylish without breaking the bank.
Anyway, now I live in a smaller Midwestern city with my boyfriend Daniel. We're both engineers, working at different companies but in the same general social circle because it's a small town. We often go out after work with our work friends. Sometimes his group, sometimes my group, sometimes both groups end up merging because there's one bar we all like a lot.
And on Thursday, we were out with a group of work friends from both of our offices. One of my boyfriend's coworkers was making jokes about how my boyfriend had probably blown his whole bonus on the handbag I was carrying, and that's why he was still dressed like a slob. (This guy knew what it was because he had apparently bought his girlfriend a real one)
My boyfriend said that I bought all my stuff on my own, he's no sucker.
And I felt like he was making me out to be some idiot who would spend thousands on a bag, so I said "No way I'd spent that either, I bought this off a dude in an alley in (old city), what kind of dumbass do you take me for!"
The group we were with laughed at that, and one of my friends from my job asked if all the nice stuff I wear is fake, and I said "fuck yeah it is, I think it's ridiculous to drop thousands on something that's just priced for the name."
And my friend was surprised, he'd always thought fakes would look more fake and tacky, but I'd always been the best dressed person in the office. I made some joke about that being a low bar because of them all, and the topic was dropped.
I had the impression from that conversation that nobody was put off by what I said. It's a group of engineers tbh, practical types who probably respect NOT blowing your paycheck on designer shit more than they respect status symbols. One of my other coworkers actually told me later that he ought to take his wife to (my old city) to save some money on gifts for her!
But last night after we went home, my boyfriend told me that he was humiliated by how I bragged to everyone about all my bags and stuff were fake. And that he didn't want me wearing that stuff around him again because it'd be embarrassing being out with someone who everyone knows is wearing knockoffs.
I told him he was being silly, a bag's a bag, and if it looked cute back when only he and I knew it wasn't real... It still looks cute. And it still works fine for what it is.
Plus, something I've seen in life is that you don't have to be "sexy" or "stylish" in the conventional ways all the time. Doing what makes you happy and doing it with confidence is way sexier than doing everything by the book.
And he was obviously the only one who cared about status symbols, nobody else there was judging me.
When I said that, he told me I was being super socially oblivious.
I don't think I was but I guess there's no way to know that impartially...
So, can I have advice? I don't want to replace many of my clothes and accessories, but my boyfriend doesn't want me wearing them out in public now that the "secret" that they're fake is out.
tldr; I told a group of work friends that my designer bags and clothes are all fake. My boyfriend is very embarrassed, which I think is an overreaction because I'm not ashamed. How do I handle this in the future?
Submitted April 26, 2019 at 08:16AM by TiaOragne http://bit.ly/2Vq5zg1
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