French Luxury Brand Offers $2,145 Clone of Ikea's 99 Cent Shopping Bag

The Paris-based luxury fashion house Balenciaga's recently released Arena Extra-Large Shopping Tote is uncannily similar to Ikea's crunchy and wrinkly foldable bag Frakta ("Freight" in Swedish) in everything but price. For the price of one flashy Balenciaga bag, one could buy several thousand durable Ikea bags for less than a dollar each. The two are so similar that a nearsighted person might not tell the difference, at least from a distance. On top of that, Ikea's Frakta is credited with an almost peerless spaciousness and may contain a medium-size TV-set, 19 gallons of clothes or any 25-kilogram load.

While wisecrackers described the Balenciaga bag as a "luxury version" of Ikea's blue plastic box, it remains unclear whether the French fashion house had the Swedish bag in mind when conceiving its new accessory. Nevertheless, the Swedish furniture giant humorously claimed to have perceived the similarity as homage to its trademark Ikea bag.

"We are deeply flattered that the Balenciaga tote bag resembles the Ikea iconic sustainable blue bag for 99 cents. Nothing beats the versatility of a great big blue bag!" Ikea told Today in an e-mail.

Apart from the price and the prestige of a Balenciaga bag among fashion victims, there appear some crucial differences between Balenciaga's bag and the standard Swedish sack with respect to material. The designer bag is made of leather and features a zipper, while Ikea's foldable bag is made of plastic and lacks a zipper. Additionally, Ikea's logo is predictably absent from the handles of Balenciaga's bag, which instead sports a gold-stamped logo on the top.

Earlier this year, Balenciaga sparked outrage by releasing a luxury $2,000 vest which strongly resembles the life jackets available in aircraft, which spurred an endless spate of online jibes.

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