A hand moves menacingly into the picture, approaches the poor little Prada loafer with the big kitchen scissors. A few seconds later the gold framed Prada emblem is removed from the top of the ostrich leather shoe, brushed and cleaned, fitted with metal rings, attached to a thick curb chain. The poor Prada shoe is left naked and logoless. What the heck is going on here?
The video comes from Instagram, from an account called @luxereworked. Behind it is the Canadian company LUXE Reworked, which boasts on its website that it offers “luxury jewelry” that is “affordable for everyone”. According to the company, it works like this: LUXE Reworked buys second-hand designer fashion, takes the coveted metal logos from jackets, shoes and handbags and uses them to create new pieces of jewelry.
The golden, logo-decorated grip panels of an old Fendi bag – the small metal plates that you use to pull the zipper – then become a chain pendant. Likewise, a silver jewelry detail removed from a Chanel shoe, or the triangular logo emblem of a Prada bag; Rings and bracelets are also made in this way. Again and again: snip, snip, logo off, brush and clean and turn it into a piece of jewellery. This of course raises some questions.
First of all, are real designer parts being cut up and destroyed? The company states on its website under “Authenticity”: “We only use genuine designer components to rework them and convert them into jewellery.” However, there is no further information on where the second-hand parts come from – just like an indication of the condition they were in before the kitchen scissors martyrdom.
Because another question is this: Why would you even take apart a nice second-hand Prada shoe, a good old Vuitton bag, a used Chanel model to make something else out of it? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to pass on well-preserved second-hand goods to those who can enjoy them without a massacre of snippets? Or – if the old designer pieces are no longer in such good shape – to professionally refurbish them and put them back into the fashion cycle?
If you can’t afford it, you have to do without it
It is also questionable whether this approach is permissible at all. In a small footnote on its website, the company states that “the trademarks belong to the respective brands. LUXE Reworked is not affiliated with any of the brands, brand owners or trademarks.” It is doubtful whether the elegant fashion houses feel sufficiently differentiated from the questionable range of Canadian suppliers.
But the most glaring question remains this: Why would anyone want to wear severed metal logos as jewelry? An interest seems to exist; LUXE Reworked has been active on Instagram since the end of 2020 and continues to publish destructive kitchen scissors videos – the one with the abused Prada loafer only went online a week ago. Of course, there is a great desire for luxury goods, especially those that are all too clearly recognizable by large-format branding and logo symbols. But isn’t a Chanel bracelet just a Chanel bracelet if it was conceived as such by Chanel?
The trend towards swanky displays of expensive luxury brands has recently been widely discussed in fashion gazettes under the catchphrase “Logomania”. With Generation Z, they are now followed by a youth that prefers to wear the Gucci bag with an all-over logo pattern in addition to Vuitton sneakers and Balenciaga baseball caps. You can find it, but you don’t have to. In most cases it honestly looks dead boring. In any case, it’s like this: you have to be able to afford the look – or leave it altogether.
It’s not as if there aren’t some super-affordable logos that have become just as much a style statement as their lavish siblings. Wearing DHL t-shirts and IKEA bags, for example, was quite popular a few years ago – so much so that luxury brands Vetements and Balenciaga eventually even adapted the cheap logos and plastic bags and sold them to their customers for hundreds of times the price. And sports brands with a logo at moderate prices are always an option.
But please: no fakes! And also no logo bracelets and chains, which have absolutely nothing to do with the luxury brand shown. It doesn’t look distinguished and design-savvy at all. But rather: Pretty cheap. Incidentally, the LUXE jewelery is not even that – really cheap. They cost from around 100 euros for the “Givenchy” bracelet to around 170 euros for the “Chanel” chain. You could also simply buy fashion jewelery from a label with humane prices – without a poor old Prada shoe having to believe in it.