Zara has The Item everyone wants – and at £59.99, it's a steal

The high street is now expert at making clothes that resemble high-end fashion, and sometimes a piece just takes off

 Olivia Palermo in Zara trousers during London fashion week. Photograph: Christian Vierig/Getty Images

Morwenna Ferrier

Friday 21 October 201610.47 EDTLast modified on Friday 21 October 201615.35 EDT

It happened three years ago, with an £85 M&S pink wide-lapel coat – and now it has happened again. After racking up thousands of views on Zara’s website and being spotted on the likes of Olivia Palermo, a pair of £59.99 black wide-legged trousers has become The Item – a much-desired high street designer knock-off that attracts punters in droves, sells out everywhere, and gives the brand responsible a firm grip on the zeitgeist.

It works like this: a piece of clothing appears in a high street shop. Resembling something on the catwalk or a trend in the ether, it is usually placed at the entrance by the security gates. Eminently more wearable (and cheaper) than its designer counterpart, and having had a decent run in glossy magazines, it gets snapped up. People see it on their friends, and compelled by a desire to own something they don’t need, want it, compounded by the fact that it is a) now out of stock and b) worn by fashion-cognisant types who can sniff out a cult piece a mile off. And lo, The Item is born.

The Zara trousers, with two thick red stripes down the side, have the tics – stripe width, shape – of Chloe’s SS16 track pants, without wading into plagiaristic waters. They racked up 1,000 views a week online, and despite arriving in store almost two months ago, according to the eCommerce site Lyst, they are currently the second most-viewed product on the site.

It helps, of course, that they are flattering, that an “American socialite” like Palermo who can afford Chloe has bought them, and that Zara is often designed with taller, slimmer people in mind so that their wearers act as ersatz models. And that, thanks to the fact the athleisure market (sporty-looking clothes that would be wholly disastrous worn on the track) has exploded, or even peaked – there are currently more than eight variations of this sort of pseudo-trackpant at Zara alone – the market is flooded; there is too much choice. The same is likely to happen with a Mango skirt – patent with a looped belt – which has had a 122% increase in page views in the last two weeks and is now mostly sold out.

I think people can feel disenfranchised from high-end fashion and thus don't feel any guilt about buying 'fakes'

Katherine Ormerod

Any feeling that the derivative nature of The Item should limit its success misreads the consumer mood. “I do think that people can feel disenfranchised from high-end fashion and thus don’t feel any guilt about buying ‘fakes’,” explains Katherine Ormerod, editorial director at Lyst. “The high street has become increasingly brazen with its rip-offs, fuelled no doubt by the countless loopholes that allow brands peddling near-identical fakes to evade prosecution. For a consumer it is a quandary – if you would never be able to afford the JW Anderson buckle skirt, why wouldn’t you opt for Mango’s imitation? Especially when it has been reinvented in patent – the season’s hottest fabric?”

While these items aren’t exactly fakes (moreover there is a lag – the M&S coat came a year after the catwalk versions, and the Zara trousers are last season’s Chloe) the inspiration is palpable. And, in a new twist, Zara keeps restocking the trousers – so expect to see them even more.

People also look to certain brands, Zara included, for direction. Zara, apparently, plants spies on the front row of fashion shows, and can efficiently reproduce an on-trend item in a few weeks. But equally powerful has been the recent wave of designer-high street collaborations, which allows labels to control things. November sees the arrival of a Kenzo x H&M collaboration and one item – a pink shearling and leather jacket – looks set to be another Item.

The M&S pink coat was not the first illustration of the high street cult, but was one of the most effective examples of what can be done with excessive PR hammering, advertising, celebrity endorsements (Daisy Lowe, nothing short of this generation’s everywoman, wore hers a lot) and, to an extent, mirroring of the catwalk. The 2012 shows were heavy with pink coats, from Osman to Jil Sander, and while this coat was not a direct rip-off, it bore the correct hue. This coat became the perfect representation of our confused love of fashion, of wanting to be on trend without having the capital, and wanting to buy into a trend – a whimsical, impractical one at that – for under £100. And when you consider what counts as cult on the catwalk – Vetements’s DHL T-shirt (ironic) or the Hermès Birkin bag (huge waiting list, four-figure price-tag) – these are accessible.

Of course, the moment something is branded as cult it automatically renders it uncool, at least among certain legions. “We all know they [the trousers] are Zara now – there’s something so precise about the cut and finish that could entirely pass for designer,” explains Hannah Almassi, editorial director at Who What Wear UK, who doesn’t own a pair, but does get why the world does. “You can’t place these trousers as high street or high fashion, the side stripe and wide-leg silhouette are inherently flattering, and tap into athleisure without making you feel like a slave to the trend.”

Still, no amount of advertising or celebrity endorsement can control a cult: it just happens and, it would seem, arbitrarily. “Whenever I shop in Zara I steer entirely clear of the must-have hot pieces,” explains Ormerod. “You can see them a mile away … I’ve been to too many dinners wearing the same outfit as someone sitting next to me.”

For every customer who buys into a cult item, there’s a customer who doesn’t want to be part of a cult. The strange thing is: for as long as we want what we can’t have, we’ll still want The Item – even if, in fact, everyone else has it, too