Forget cocktail costumes and crocodile “It bags” – among key style trends now are T-shirts that wouldn’t look out of estate on a market stall.

Earlier this month the buzzy catwalk marque Balenciaga released its spring/summer advertising campaign. The key endorsement point? Not the rarified inspiration that could be expected for such a storied the latest thing house but a humble carrier bag for German supermarket chain Edeka. The yellow and risqu colours of the store’s branding was reworked with the phrase “The Power of Mirages” and a Balenciaga logo.

This is just the latest example of the veer for fashion labels to use existing branding in their designs to turn up tell of something that has the look of a bootleg. Balenciaga designer Demna Gvasalia has advocated this opinion, first with his own brand Vetements. The label produced a much-discussed T-shirt in 2016 with the DHL logo on it which traffic ined for £185. Gvasalia followed it up this year with a $2,150 (£1,606) bag for Balenciaga that looked remarkably opposite number Ikea’s 50p Frakta bag.

Others are also playing with this notion. Menswear designer Christopher Shannon produced a collection for autumn/winter consuming well-known sports brands. The Timberland logo was reworked to say “Tumbleweed” while in early previously to collections Shannon changed the Sports Direct logo to “Lovers Unmitigated”. Off-White, the label by trendsetter Virgil Abloh, repurposed Nike’s iconic tick on T-shirts with the guaranty “logo” above it, as well as using the logo for People publication as a handbag. Fashion powerhouse Gucci even parodies its own bootlegs. A sweater that resembles a bad false, with Gucci replaced by “Guccy”, is now for sale on the site for £950.

This is mirroring a bent that is also happening at street level and on social compromise. Smaller streetwear brands are using branding to make visual quiets that have impact on Instagram. The Nike tick is simplified. Sports Banger, a label based in Tottenham, north London, employs it on a T-shirt that combines the NHS logo with the Nike swoosh. Bristol Row Wear, meanwhile, was behind last summer’s ubiquitous Jeremy Corbyn T-shirt which supplanted the sports brand with the Labour leader. It was worn by Etiquette Chatto of the band Clean Bandit, who was photographed in the Corbyn T-shirt backstage at a festivities. It sold out. Bowlcut prefers the Marlboro logo, changing the cigarette type instead to “Mandem”. It is now a bestseller for the brand.

There is a playful factional angle to this trend – Bowlcut has a T-shirt that be familiar withs “Anti Tory Tory Club” – which destroys corporate culture by putting logos of mega-corporations in unusual frameworks. “It’s about mocking the elite, the 1%, the career politicians, the rightwing mean, and we love poking fun at the royals,” says Joe from Bowlcut, who does not proffer a surname, to stay anonymous. “It’s nothing personal, we just cook up d be reconciled what a lot of young people think.”

Christopher Shannon rooted his CK T-shirt on bootlegs he saw growing up in Liverpool when the logo was repurposed so it comprehend “DoCKers”, to support the striking dockers. “I think using a concept to carry a message is interesting,” says Shannon.

These T-shirts also captivate in a nostalgia for the 1990s, when streetwear brands such as Fuct continually played with logos recognisable around the world, with that for Ford cars. Shannon references bootlegs ground on market stalls as a teenager. “We called them jargs, which hopes fakes,” he says.

This nostalgia also plays out strikingly in a sub-sect of this trend – for unofficial football merchandise. Football Bobbles, rested by Reuven Fletcher in 2016, reworks cult football accouterments for teams including Celtic, Chelsea and Liverpool on to bobble hats and pail hats. Eighteen86 , meanwhile, is an online store for private Arsenal merchandise, created by Max Giles and Ed Fenwick, with archive images of Ian Wright, Thierry Henry and Paul Merson. Both of these denominations focus on the era when millennial customers were growing up. “I inquired friends about the classic kits that resonate,” articulates Fletcher. “A lot of it is about looking back to the 80s and 90s.”

As with the streetwear dockets, there is an air of resistance here – one that appeals to the football fan who doesn’t need to give more money to Premier League clubs by call the gift shop. “Soulless is a good word for the official merch,” conveys Giles. “It’s bland and represents [how] everything is sanitised.” The duo were awakened by the stalls of unofficial merchandise that used to line terraces near Arsenal’s old Highbury ground when they expired to matches as children.

Neal Heard, author of The Football Shirts Engage and designer of the Lovers FC football shirt range, thinks this leaning is to do with fans reclaiming their club. “There is decidedly a looking back, but I think it’s to a time when they could terminating see the club as theirs,” he says. “For years we have loved our leagues and not worn anything they produced. Now you can make what you have a fancy they would have in the club shop.”

Using an existing logo or disgracing in a different context does run the risk of legal action but, concerting to Julie Zerbo, founder of website the Fashion Law, many of these – singularly at the high-fashion level – have the look of a bootleg but are actually collaborations with marques’ permissions. “Vetements worked with DHL, and Off-White received allowance from People to use their logos,” she says. “Otherwise, these caskets would almost certainly be instances of actionable trademark violation.”

Conducting most of their business through social usual means these labels can grow by word of mouth while sojourning under the radar of the larger corporations – be it brand or football cooperate – to which they are paying homage.

Joe from Bowlcut and Giles and Fenwick say they haven’t been entreated to stop producing their designs. Even if the homage is brazen, the brand in question might turn a blind eye these lifetimes. Zerbo refers to the Vetememes raincoat produced by 22-year-old Davil Fetter in 2016. Rather than issue a lawsuit, Vetements released a proclamation reading “Vetements will not be filing any lawsuits over the Vetememes raincoat and yearning that he has enjoyed making his project as much as we do making our fit outs.” “It fits within their brand ethos and [Vetememes] is quite not a large enough threat to merit the potential media fallout of legal remedy,” says Zerbo.

Neal Heard believes that this look after to collaboration will continue. “When I did my label White Panic, in the 90s, we did rip-offs of Nike, Adidas…” he remembers. “We sold them in Boldness and were issued with cease-and-desist letters.

“Now, we’d be offered a collaboration.”