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To the undiscerning eye, the couch, at first glance, looked more like a bean bag than an actual sofa. Its surface is creased like a Shar Pei dog, wrinkled but still invitingly plush (made out of foam, I later learned). For a few weeks last year, I kept encountering its hulking silhouette across the various interior design Instagram accounts I followed. There were iterations of the couch in moss green, ecru white, blue velvet, and tan leather upholstery, both as a singular loveseat and as a modular set. I was led to believe, under the influence of my social media feeds, that the bean bag was a living room staple. Everyone appeared to own one. It wasn’t until I entered the home of a young artist friend that I learned of its name—the Togo sofa, designed by Michel Ducaroy for Ligne Roset in 1973. His loveseat, purchased new, cost $4,320, but a friend of his had just purchased a knockoff for a fraction of the price on Amazon. “It kind of feels the same when I sit on it,” he admitted, “except I can actually sell mine if I get tired of it.”
Before the Togo, there was the Murano mushroom lamp, the Ultrafragola squiggly neon-lit mirror, the blob-like Bellini sofas, and the Cesca dining chairs—eye-catching home objects and accessories that have become trendy, for better or for worse, among consumers in their early-to-mid 20s, a large fragment of Gen Z. This population of furniture buyers, unlike some of their elders, is unique in cultivating their interior aesthetics quite early on, thanks to platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok. Gen Z celebrities, too, like Emma Chamberlain, Chlöe Bailey, and Iris Apatow, are eager to exhibit their meticulously-designed homes on social media display. Rather than seek out the guidance of print magazines or established designers, an approach that may be more often afforded to people with disposable income, Gen Z’s decorating style is colored by a do-it-yourself ethos, characterized by bold colors, playful patterns (like checkerboard or wiggles), and other aesthetic flairs that can be easily summed up in a word or phrase, like avant basic, Space Age, Art Deco, or beach house boho.
There is, however, a curious homogeneity to these aesthetic experiments, as young buyers’ tastes are influenced by and reflected through the lens of social media. For example, midcentury modern becomes a design aesthetic to emulate (or repudiate) instead of a specific era to source furniture from. Young people today could suffer from inspiration overload—an excess of interior design inspiration, one would assume, as a result of the internet—but the opposite, in fact, may be true.
“On Instagram, you encounter so many different visual moodboard accounts, but they’re often sharing the same apartments, the same spaces,” explains Lalé Boz, an interior designer and founder of Normal NYC, adding that certain images or aesthetics seem to be favored by the Instagram algorithm. “There actually might be repeated overexposure to the same spaces or images, recycled by different accounts. Because the images look similar, it creates the impression that something is an interior trend.”
Since the pandemic, more online content has revolved around home goods and interior design. And much like with fashion, interiors have become privy to cycles of virality, as aesthetic trends and microtrends emerge and fade. Aesthetics function as a form of cosplay for Gen Z–aged consumers, a decorative means to convey their persona through what they wear and what they own—clothes, jewelry, and, increasingly, furniture. Many seek out home furnishings with retailers or platforms they’re already familiar with, such as Urban Outfitters, H&M Home, IKEA, Wayfair, Amazon, and Target. These big brands also have strong influencer partnership programs, reinforcing their dominance among a younger demographic of furniture buyers.
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Alex Bass, founder and curator of Salon 21, an art advisory and interior design firm, points out that first-time decorators tend to buy from one furniture brand or stick with the same style throughout their apartment. This cohesion is “a big faux pas,” Alex says, and the results are not always appealing or distinct. “I always advise clients to create an aesthetic balance. You wouldn’t want the coffee table and couch to be exactly the same style as everything else in the apartment.”
Yet, stylistic consistency is somewhat of a virtue that’s sought after online. If a person’s interior approach can be neatly summarized in a short description or phrase (i.e. IKEA minimalism, CB2 chic, Urban Outfitters eclectic), then this aesthetic appears, in a sense, easily achievable to followers. One’s home, much like personal style, can be emulated through a mass consumption catalog found on Instagram and TikTok. Certain furniture trends, then, serve as aesthetic submarkets for consumers to determine their style and identity. What better way for your home to embody cottagecore, an aesthetic that glamorizes aspects of rural living, than to purchase a Murano mushroom lamp? And if you can’t afford or find an original Murano, why not buy a lamp dupe that superficially resembles the original?
Having grown up in an extravagant online shopping ecosystem, younger furniture buyers are unfazed by the prevalence of affordable dupes—the catch-all term that’s used to refer to counterfeit products, knockoffs, replicas, fakes of all kinds. As a result, dupe culture has proliferated, and furniture dupe hunters take pride in sourcing and sharing aesthetic dupes they find online. On various Reddit forums related to interior decorating, some savvy users have created “dupe finders” to simplify the search process for others. “This started as a personal problem—I wanted nice-looking furniture without paying a crap ton of money,” one user wrote, explaining why they opted for furniture dupes. “Not to mention I still have $50k tuition debt to pay (thanks college). I spent a lot of time looking at expensive furniture and finding cheaper alternatives that would give [my space] a similar look.”
Perhaps what powers dupe culture—and dupe buyers—is instant gratification, coupled with the underlying desire to superficially emulate an original style that is out of one’s immediate reach. Interior designers like Lalé and Alex spend weeks, if not months, sourcing key items for their clients. “A good piece of furniture that is well-sourced could take a lot of time, but it gives me a crazy heartbeat feeling when I finally get it,” Lalé says. “In my design principle, I believe in stories, not trends. A vintage piece has its own story and when you buy it from the previous owner, you add your own story on top of it.”
With dupes, there is no story—just the end of a direct-to-consumer pipeline. They’re not often built to last, though major retailers have contributed to furniture dupes going mainstream. “I’ve had clients approach me with a $12,000 couch that they like but can’t afford,” says Alex. “With that couch’s style in mind, I will do my best to find contemporary and vintage solutions for you to get that similar look at a more affordable price point, rather than resorting to dupes.”
Many young buyers don’t have the time or the resources to spend their days scouring secondhand marketplaces or auction houses. It’s much easier to resort to a dupe, or a dupe of a dupe, with the understanding that you can always sell it to another secondhand dupe hunter on Facebook Marketplace. Aesthetics have taken precedence over authenticity on social media, and the authenticity of a piece of furniture, after all, is almost impossible to determine online.
