the.com/knockoff

Confidence wearing a logo it never earned.

means A cheap imitation of a brand-name product, made to look like the real thing but without the quality or the right to the name.

from From the verb phrase 'knock off,' meaning to produce quickly and cheaply — itself from 'knock,' as in knocking out a task with a few rough blows rather than careful craft. 'Knock off' had long meant to dash something off hastily (a knocked-off poem, a knocked-off job); by the mid-20th century it narrowed to the specific sin of dashing off an unauthorized copy of someone else's design, and the noun 'knockoff' followed to name the fake itself.

origin
term rose with 1960s counterfeit sneaker trade
legal line
copying function is legal, copying trademark is not
economics
thrives wherever brand markup outpaces actual quality gap
irony
some knockoffs now get their own cult following
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