As a blogger, I know that BlackMilk are pretty much everyone's favourite clothing brand and up until recently I'd not had the pleasure of wearing one of their designs. Not to mention the fact that I've never really been able to afford anything from them. Their designs are always on-point, so fashionable and versatile, and I've spent many an hour starring at their website hoping and praying one day I'd have enough money to own one of their drop-dead gorgeous dresses.
With any popular brand there is always going to be fakes. For me, this isn't such a bad thing (though I know many others wouldn't agree). I just think it's essential that designs should be available for the mass market and at a fair enough price. Plus, let's be honest, BlackMilk aren't the only company on the internet that make these sorts of dresses in these sorts of materials. It's a copy of a copy of a copy and aren't at all original. Which brings me to the question - why do we find copies to be such a bad thing when really everything is a copy anyway?
I personally now own two BlackMilk dupes and one original BlackMilk dress, so I feel like I can at least give you an honest review on each of these. This way you can make your own mind up about buying fakes. In this post I'm only going to be looking at the quality and design of each of the dresses, how they were made is a completely different and moral thing and that's for you to decide and not for me to dictate.
I don't know if you can tell from the first photograph which two are fake and which one is real. The real one is the absolutely gorgeous Beauty & The Beast dress which is now sitting in my wardrobe waiting for my birthday on Saturday. The other two I bought from one of the many ebay dress sellers out there. The lowest quality of the fakes in my opinion is the Lord Of The Rings map dress. You can tell this is a cheaply made dress as the print is quite wishy-washy and pixely. It's also got a bit of a strange shape to it so if you're lacking in the boob and bum department this dress could look too big on you. It's definitely designed more for the curvier lady. Regardless I still really like it, the dress looks fantastic on photographs and unless you looked really carefully you wouldn't know this was a fake. Plus it cost my about £5 instead of £47....so I can't really complain about it!
The second dupe is this Zombie Nation dress. This was a really popular design for BlackMilk a while back but is no longer stocked by them, so I had to find it elsewhere. Googling Galaxy Milk will find you thousand of BlackMilk rip-offs on Ebay, some good, some bad. This one is a lot better than the Lord Of The Rings dress.
Firstly the material is very similar to BlackMilk's material. It's so silky and soft and feels like it is of quite good quality. For me there is only two small differences between this dress and the real one - 1. the pattern is a little bit pixely, though not to the same degree as the Lord Of The Rings dress. You can clearly tell what is on this dress and it looks great. It's just the black colours are a bit greyer, that's all. 2. The dress fits differently to BlackMilk's. The top part of the dress is a lot longer than it should be therefore making the dress more midi than mini. It doesn't look bad though and I think it would be fine for taller people! I'm just super short.
Finally, the real deal! I'm pretty sure you can tell just from these pictures how brilliant the quality is. The design is crisp and bold, there's no pixels and no wishy-washyness. It's literally so perfect. The material is great and you can tell it's high quality but then of course it should be for the price! This bad boy was over £50 and took three weeks to arrive.
In my personal opinion I think if you can afford it and you are willing to wait then you should definitely go for the real deal. The quality of the others just doesn't compare to how fantastic the real deal is. But of course, not everyone has £50 to waste on one piece of clothing, and not everyone wants to wait a month for it to arrive, which is completely fair enough. There's nothing ridiculously wrong with the fakes, they are completely wearable and very pretty. Plus for the cheap price they are absolute steals and I'd never try to put someone off wearing a fake.
What do you think about fakes? Would you buy one?
