Why is MSCHF selling empty branded bags?

The great capitalist memeification is being carried out by the art collective MSCHF through the sale of empty designer bags for 40 dollars a piece. Achieving the aesthetics of consumption has never been so easy, dressing up in an apparent luxury that underlies the maximum expression of post-modern absurdity.

This satirical project highlights the irrational undercurrent of paying for a branded bag: a phenomenon that is booming on resale portals such as eBay, Depop and Vinted. OnlyBags thus ironically follows in this wake as an iconoclastic e-commerce shop that displays bags from high-end brands such as Fendi, Hermès or Burberry for 40 dollars.

The Brooklyn-based art collective, known for launching products ranging from plugs to sneakers to the sword worn by Grimes at the Met Gala 2021, introduces this new cartoonish concept to the market under the slogan: “Fake it till you make it”. Precisely something very much in sync with an era in which people seem to validate themselves through unrealistic looks and/or status.

That’s the idea Onlybags projects in its manifesto: “If you can’t consume – and you know you can’t, or at least not at the level you crave, not at the level you’ve been fed by social media and the mediated fiction of celebrity existence – you can least aspire to achieve the consumer aesthetic“.

THE CAPITALIST COSTUME

On the website, in addition to bags from high-end brands, we find others from Sephora, IKEA or Victoria’s Secret. A range with which to replace the mask with a bag, awakening the longed-for “envy” of passers-by.

At this point, we wonder if the collective will get into legal trouble with brands again, as it did with the launch of the Air Max 97 “Satan” created with Lil Nas. Because desecrating the intellectual property of others and satirically subverting the law also comes at a price.