Most of the women on the RepLadies forum buy imitation bags while being able to buy authentic bags: it’s a matter of pride and practicality. If they spent their fortune on original bags, they wouldn’t have that fortune.

A 25-year-old New York tech worker with an annual salary of $135,000 confesses that for her, handbags are like personal achievements: “I recognize that handbags are symbols of status and wealth, and nothing of these are healthy goals to pursue. But I would like to think that my bags are more than that: they represent a deeply personal journey that marks events in my own life." The user, who bought an authentic Yves Saint Laurent bag to celebrate a recent pay raise, now has a collection that combines real bags with imitation ones and recognizes that since she has been wearing those branded bags, people around her treat her a lot better.

“I buy fake bags before dinner because they fill me up more,” confesses a 44-year-old woman from Illinois who earns $70,000 a year, in a household where they put together a total salary of $250,000. The woman accumulates more than a hundred imitation bags; she also has some authentic pieces. She admits spending more than $15,000 on fake bags.

“I collect bags and husbands”, says an unemployed 30-year-old woman whose husband earns about $300,000 a year. She spends about $6,000 a year on fakes and has more than 20 at home. She doesn’t need to have real bags, she just loves to spend money on fakes of hers that she’s been able to buy thanks to a successful divorce. A woman in her 30s from New York, an engineer, who earns $200,000 a year is presented as “well dressed and depressed.” She says that, since she was little, she never paid much attention to original products: “I think my first replicas were pirate versions of Digimon.” She now has more than 47 bags; she neither knows nor wants to know which of them are true or false.