You can’t step foot on campus 
without seeing at least one 
person clad in Greek life apparel 
inspired by pop culture. Hoodies 
in the vein of Travis Scott’s 
Astroworld 
merchandise, 
but 
with 
“Alphaworld” 
instead. 
Bape-inspired T-shirts that say 
“A BATHING AEPI.” Sometimes 
Greek Letter Organization (GLO) 
apparel is so smoothly designed 
that at a glance, you can’t tell it’s 
not the original — what I thought 
was a Champion reverse weave 
hoodie actually said “Delta” on 
the left-chest logo.
The 
branded 
nature 
of 
Greek life shouldn’t come as 
any surprise: The University of 
Michigan might be the world’s 
most heavily-branded school, and 
fittingly, its student body is very 
brand-conscious in their choice of 
apparel.
Part of me detected a nefarious 
capitalist 
invasion 
on 
our 
identities pervading campus. I’m 
reminded of the fashion world’s 
favorite Calvin and Hobbes comic 
strip. In it Calvin wishes his 
shirt had a logo on it — “It says 
to the world, ‘My identity is so 
wrapped up in what I buy that I 
paid the company to advertise its 
products!’”
At first, I thought brand-
inspired GLO apparel was the 
fucked-up final form of this 
phenomenon. I myself am a Greek 
life outsider, and I initially saw 
people whose personas were 
conflated with companies to the 
point that they couldn’t make 

the choice between representing 
their Greek org or their cultured 
(read: 
wealthy) 
taste 
for 
expensive brands. There exists a 
widely-held belief that Greek life 
is full of silver-spoon white people 
with no perspective on reality 
— something that quickly falls 
apart when you meet someone in 
Greek life and find out that they’re 
real people — but nonetheless, 
it exists. Seeing students with a 
Greek letter Supreme box logo 
imitation feeds into that image.
I say at first because I’ve 
checked my ego since then. Really, 

I’m no exception to the rule: I too 
live for clothing brands. There are 
some companies I adore because 
they are minimally branded — 
Uniqlo comes to mind — but I love 
having Nikes on my feet. It’s a sad 
day for me if the waistband of my 
underwear doesn’t have “Tommy 
Hilfiger” wrapped around it.
Not only that, but some of these 
designs are actually super clever. 
My older brother, a devout Sigma 
Pi at Grand Valley State University, 
once came home for the summer 

with a T-shirt that had the van 
from the deluxe edition cover 
of Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, 
M.A.A.D. City photoshopped in 
front of their fraternity house. 
There I saw the potential in these 
pop culture parodies. For every 
shitty Supreme bogo knockoff, 
there was a brilliant parody. I 
sometimes even wish I was in a 
fraternity as the apparel chair, so 
I could come up with something 
clever for my brothers to wear. 
Has anybody made a Greek life 
hoodie with the Quaker Oats logo 
yet?

But the question is: How are 
these t-shirts born? Where does 
GLO apparel come from? That’s 
what this B-Side’s curious editor 
asked, smelling a vast conspiracy 
underneath all this merchandise 
mimicry. Her request for an 
interview 
with 
Underground 
Printing 
turned 
up 
short; 
according to them, the company 
managing 
licensing 
for 
GLO 
apparel — more on that later — has 
strict guidelines and “Generally 
speaking, they do not allow 

(those) imitations and parodies.” 
But that couldn’t be the end of it, 
could it?
The case went cold, and I was 
prepared to do a deep-dive on 
Greek imitations based on my 
own speculation and suspicion. 
Frantically I texted my older 
brother, begging him to tell me 
where the hell those clothes 
came from. Then a friend of a 
friend of a friend led us to Greek 
Dressing. At last, we found it: An 
apparel company that seemed 
to specialize in just the kind 
of merchandise on which I’m 
writing 
about 
now. 
Tuesday 
afternoon, I caught up with the 
brains behind the operation.
LSA senior Everest Guerra 
laid the groundwork for Greek 
Dressing in the early part of 
his college career. “Freshman, 
sophomore year, I noticed my 
fraternity was making a lot of 
apparel,” Guerra said. “Like a lot a 
lot of apparel. Like $30,000 a year 
in apparel.”
That may sound like a stretch, 
but some napkin mathematics told 
me that number was very realistic. 
For bigger fraternities, with 150 
or more brothers each dropping 
$200 or more on clothing over 
a year, that $30,000 number is 
right in sight. Now multiply that 
$200 figure times 4,200 students 
involved 
in 
Greek 
life. 
The 
University of Michigan alone has 
a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar 
per year Greek apparel industry. 
That’s a lot of design work, a lot 
of transactions, a lot of logistics. 
That’s where companies like 
Greek Dressing come in.
Guerra saw those complications 
in his own fraternity’s apparel 
production. “The designs weren’t 
that cool … the process for 
ordering was really hard … there 
just wasn’t a really good system for 
it. And I kinda saw an opportunity 
to improve on the system we had.”
Greek 
Dressing 
was 
born 
to solve those problems. The 
process is simple: Fraternities 
and sororities bring their ideas 
for apparel to their campus 
representative. 
An 
in-house 
design team renders a proof, 
and through an online feedback 
platform, the campus reps go back 
and forth with their client until a 
final design is produced. A private 
web store is constructed for the 
client where their members can 
purchase the clothes themselves. 
Then the garments are produced 
(usually by a local printer in 
Detroit) and fulfilled by Greek 
Dressing.
When I first read the local 
printer’s response to my editor’s 
interview request saying that 
Greek apparel imitating popular 
brands were not allowed, an image 
was conjured in my mind of GLOs 
working to produce clothing in 
the dark so that their rip-offs 
could survive in the light. But as it 
turns out, a sophisticated system 

underlies their production.
A quick peek at the Greek 
Dressing lookbook shows that pop 
culture references play a big part 
in their design philosophy. Guerra 
explained that they incorporate 
those 
references 
into 
their 
designs to set them apart from 

other companies doing a similar 
thing (as it turns out, there are 
many). Some orgs know exactly 
what they want, but others go 
through a sometimes lengthy 
design process.
“One of our clients is going to 
Toronto for a formal, and they just 
asked us to come up with a couple 
different designs,” Guerra said. “I 
think we’re on like design eight 
now. We got to eight, we selected 
one, which is really awesome. 
But for us it was like, OK, what’s 
important to Toronto? Drake is 
obviously a staple of Toronto, 
the Toronto Raptors are a pretty 
staple team, the Leafs, or anything 
like that. So we’ll think of pop 
culture references and try to build 
those into a lot of our garments.”
On the legal side, Guerra 
mentioned the same licensing 
company that the local printer did: 
Affinity Licensing, the governing 
body of all GLO trademarks. To 
produce Greek apparel, first a 
vendor needs to get licensed with 
Affinity, but it’s not a blanket 
license. A separate license is 
needed 
for 
each 
individual 
organization. It can be difficult 
for a small company. There are 
up-front costs associated with 
obtaining a single license. Every 
organization then has its own 
guidelines for what designs can 
be used. And of course, those 
organizations collect royalties on 
every design with their letters on 
it.
Whenever Guerra’s team makes 
a design, it goes through Affinity, 
who give it an approval or denial. 

This makes it a little easier on 
companies like Greek Dressing 
when it comes to the use of pop 
culture and existing brands. It’s a 
sort of legal grey area. I imagine 
their brand-based designs fall 
under fair use as a parody, or 
something similar. Whatever the 
technicalities are, the licensing 
company will give the thumbs up 
or thumbs down on each design.
“We made a cool Chance the 
Rapper tee and they were totally 
fine with it,” Guerra said. “But 
then we made an Off-White tee, 
and they were like, ‘No, you can’t 
use that brand.’” As his artists have 
become more and more familiar 
with what is and isn’t allowed, 
they’ve been able to anticipate 
when a design won’t get approved 
so they can advise clients to pick 
something different.
Designing apparel based on 
what’s trending is a tricky game 
because of how quickly things go 
in and out of fashion. “A Drake 
reference, 
that 
might 
work 
last month because Drake just 
dropped a new song, (but) it’s not 
gonna work in six months because 
that pop culture reference is 
played out, there’s going to be a 
million people who’ve already 
done it,” Guerra said. “We did an 
Astroworld one, and then we saw 
similar stuff coming out around 
the same time, so it’s hard to 
know sometimes who was first,” 
he added.
Interestingly, 
Guerra 
noted 
patterns among different orgs for 
what kind of references they like to 
use. “I’ve done enough University 
of Michigan organizations that I 
kind of know this organization is 
gonna be into more of the hip-hop 
pop culture references, this ones 
gonna be more into sports pop 
culture references, and this one 
just wants some crazy artwork, 
they don’t want any pop culture 
references,” he explained.
The 
conversation 
proved 
eye-opening: The underbelly of 
brand-based Greek life apparel 
was no conspiracy after all. Like 
all things Greek life, everything 
is written, set in stone under well-
documented procedure. As for the 
designs themselves, they are the 
medium for a creative race, a rush 
among fraternities and sororities 
to come up with the trendiest, 
coolest and cleverest design. 
Services like Greek Dressing have 
found a comfortable place in that 
race.
Is there a conversation to be 
had about “the American way to 
express individuality”? Maybe, 
maybe. But Greek life apparel is 
not necessarily the “final form” of 
that thinking like I once imagined 
it. It’s another avenue upon which 
“the American way” manifests 
itself, but it’s a cool one, if I say 
so myself. Greek life has turned 
pop culture references into a 
new, distinctly American form of 
creativity.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
b-side
Thursday, March 28, 2019 — 5B

Pop culture fetches a high 
price for Greek life merch

DYLAN YONO
Daily Arts Writer

ALEC COHEN / DAILY

B-SIDE SECONDARY

The fashion knockoff industry 
has been in business for possibly 
as long as the fashion industry 
itself. It is common knowledge 
that products created by high-
end designers like Gucci and 
Chanel are the dreams of many, 
only to be afforded by few. 
Thereby, the fashion knockoff 
industry has now become the 
one-stop solution for the masses. 

I say “industry” because the 
magnitude of businesses working 
in the field of making copycat 
products — namely bags, belts and 
even apparel — is astonishing, to 
say the least.
Furthermore, this industry is 
now morphing into an economy 
that shows no signs of slowing 
down, especially as the desire for 
exclusive products is becoming 
increasingly ubiquitous thanks 
to social media and the rise 
of 
influencers. 
The 
famed 
interlocking 
Gucci 
belt 
has 

become adorned by so many 
Instagram stars that it no longer 
stands out against Yeezys and 
other 
trademark 
streetwear 
goods, which now dominate the 
social sphere.
Some 
argue 
the 
copycat 
economy is founded on the basis 
of a crime: theft of design. This 
is true to a certain extent. Many 
believe that it, like any business, 
is simply fulfilling an existing 
gap in the market, matching 
the supply to the great demand 
and capitalizing on a lucrative 

business opportunity. Business 
and morals have often conflicted 
with one another, and this is no 
exception. Time and time again, 
critics have cried out against the 
rather unknown masterminds 
pulling the strings of the knockoff 
industry, and lawsuits have been 
filed, but to no avail. The fact of 
the matter is that this economy 
operates more like a complex web 
spread across the world, far too 
flawless in their working to be 
rooted out.
While 
exclusive 
brands 
charging thousands of dollars 
rightfully 
call 
those 
in 
the 
business of copying wrong, Coco 
Chanel 
herself 
very 
frankly 
admitted that knockoffs were 
simply the “ransom of success.” 
The economic impact is similar 
to a pendulum — it could 
swing either way. Often, when 
knockoffs are easily available, 
genuine customers are naturally 
less willing to shell out large 
sums of money when they find 
others enjoying the same sense 
of exclusiveness at a much lower 
cost. This possibly leads to lower 
brand loyalty, since loyalty is a 
subjective aspect, closely related 
to the availability of alternatives.
However, not all designs can be 
replicated, and definitely not all 
imitations are of similar quality to 
the original. There might be a few 
extremely well-made knockoffs 
that are almost impossible to 
distinguish from the genuine 
product, unless you were to 
examine its every intricacy: from 
the lining, to the material, to the 
type of stitch used. Moreover, 
some designs are products of 
the 
brand 
monopolizing 
on 
its superior finish, production 
technique and detail-oriented 

work, making them simply too 
difficult to copy. For example, 
replicas of the Balenciaga city 
bag often struggle to find similar 
high-quality leather quality with 
the right amount of shine.
What’s even more important 
than 
simply 
discussing 
the 
nuances of replication is the 
realization 
that 
the 
fashion 
knockoff industry is not limited to 
simply making knockoffs. It also 
includes some very popular and 
commonplace brands, all lumped 
under the category of fast fashion. 
While you can guess what these 
brands are, I am referring to 
common favourites, like Zara and 
H&M, who are indeed infamous 
for churning out designs similar 
to those seen on the runway in 
shockingly little time.
These brands work on the basis 
of microseasons and are able to 
rehaul their entire lines to match 
Fashion Week designs in as much 
or even less time it takes for the 
exclusive fashion houses to bring 
their collections from the ramp 
to their window displays. These 
brands are well-oiled machines 
with a clear system in place. The 
inclusion of these large, global 
companies 
into 
the 
copycat 
economy exponentially increases 
the size of the industry and not 
only normalizes a part of it, but 
even legalizes it. However, these 
multinational corporations are 
not without their own set of 
troubles.
The rise of fast fashion in 
the past decade has completely 
transformed how this age-old 
system 
works. 
Demand 
has 
skyrocketed 
because 
many 
consumers have come to rely on 
clothing from these cheap and 
easy brands, as they unknowingly 

become involved in this unspoken 
side of the knockoff industry.
In today’s age, the knockoff 
industry 
continues 
to 
grow 
with the introduction of online 
shopping 
and 
the 
fact 
that 
replication isn’t simply limited 
to high-end designers anymore. 
Companies based in China, like 
SheIn, are known for ripping 
off designs from more common 
stores and selling them for dirt-
cheap. They seem too be to 
good to be true, and they often 
are, thanks to their mediocre 
quality material and large-scale 
production.
What is even more amusing 
about this business of knockoffs 
is that it’s not a one way street. 
Often times, large companies, 
the likes of which include Old 
Navy and Anthropologie, have 
been accused of profiteering by 
copying the work of individual 
designers. 
This 
stream 
of 
interaction is received more with 
anger, because the masses seem 
to feel wronged in knowing that 
companies to which they shell 
out their own hard-earned money 
are profiting by stealing another 
artist’s work. The last piece of 
this puzzle is the legal aspect: I 
was surprised to find that much 
of the replication that occurs is 
legal, since small-scale designers 
often do not trademark their 
graphics or images. Furthermore, 
there have even been cases of 
designer fashion houses copying 
work, including Saint Laurent, 
Gucci and Off-White just to name 
a few. This just goes to show that 
this industry is not restricted 
by the type of product, or the 
imminence of the brand involved, 
but functions only according to 
one thing — the bottom line.

ISTOCK
The money is in the fake: 
Profitability of knockoffs

PRIYDARSHINI GOUTHI
Daily Arts Writer

B-SIDE: STYLE

Every organization then has its 
own guidelines for what designs 
can be used. And of course, those 
organizations collect royalties on every 
design with their letters on it.

It’s a sad day 
for me if the 
waistband of my 
underwear doesn’t 
have “Tommy 
Hilfiger” wrapped 
around it.

