Rachel C. Weingarten muses on Marketing, Manners and Modness

Every few weeks (days? months?) a new meme will sweep Facebook.  Some idiotic, some sublime, some a combination of both.  A few weeks ago for instance, one word declaring the color of your bra was supposed to alert the Facebook nation to your commitment to raising awareness of Breast Cancer.

Of course it was.

The meme du jour this time around is to post a photo of your doppelganger or celebrity double, or at the very least the famous person most people think you resemble.  It brings to mind those that believe in past lives and follow Shirley MacLaine’s lead in imagining themselves as having been nobility instead of dung shovelers.  Facebookians all seem to resemble only the most gorgeous or glamorous, along the lines of Catherine Zeta Jones or Marilyn Monroe and never the Susan Boyles or Karl Maldens of the spectrum.

Never one to ignore the lure of social networking peer pressure, I thought of including my own doppelganger, but was plagued with doubt.  As a teen I was told frequently that I resembled Brooke Shields and will admit that during her mullet years we looked a lot alike .  Then again, during those same years people frequently told me that I was the spitting image of Boy George, which kind of dimmed the glow of the whole Brooke Shields thing.

Celebrity obsession can be a scary thing, though for me, in this instance at least, the notion of doubles or twins is more interesting.

I’ve always followed the ABS business model with interest.  For the uninitiated, fashion designer (heavy on the irony) Allen Schwartz creates nearly immediate knock offs of the couture gowns worn by celebrities to major events.   So you might see an A-lister sweeping down the red carpet in a $25,000 creation and less than 24 hours later the $200  ABS version making an appearance on shows like Entertainment Tonight. Along those lines, when model Kate Moss talked about launching her own fashion line, she discussed being inspired by the designer favorites already in her closet and actually compared knock-off garments that were nearly identical to designer pieces she owned.

I’m perplexed on both counts.  How can it be legal and/or ethical to create an entire business based on ripping off other people’s work? While some make a career of it, I’d much prefer to see something innovative instead of a stale reworking of someone else’s hard work.

So I’m not going to share my celebrity doppelganger on Facebook and I’m certainly not going to ever build a business based off of someone else’s hard work, talent and sweat equity.  Which sounds kind of preachy, but feels right.

Rachel, who is second to none