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And by "steal", the article means "popularize pre-existing fashion"
It's a Russell conjugation. "I bricolage and salvage; you popularize pre-existing fashion; they steal and culturally appropriate." The title tweaks their nose by extending to them precisely the same courtesy they extend to everyone else.
I commented because part of me hoped for a study on why hipsters shoplift at excessive rates, despite having no economic incentive to do so. ;)
This is really confusing me:

> ...in many cases of design, copies are inferior because the new ignorant designers just did not understand the value of the features that were present, or absent ... (a)s designers know, often the most important parts of a design cannot be seen and are not even part of the design, but were what was learned in the long series of iteration as they groped towards a design that seems, in retrospect, inevitable;

But the author keeps going back to Red Wing boots. Flannel-clad hipsters are buying the same boots that professional loggers, construction workers, and firefighters are buying. I also have a wildfire-fighting relative, and siblings that did wildfire training when they worked for the National Park Service (you get a small bump in your hourly rate to get certified and available to be called up). I assure you, they are buying their boots at the same Red Wing store that sells to any hipster who walks through the door.

Yes, I am contrasting Red Wings's use by professionals to copies-of-copies. The professional use stops the degeneration of the design. If Red Wing had faded into oblivion, outcompeted by Chinese clones catering purely to fast fashion etc, you would start seeing pathologies evolve, like cancer or drawings of elephants by generations of artists who'd never seen elephants https://www.uliwestphal.de/elephas-anthropogenus/index.html . This provides a long-term rationale for Red Wing to prioritize professionals even if it comes at the cost of short-term profits, and it provides a reason for non-professionals to free-ride on the informed professional choice.

(To give a hypothetical boot example of what I mean: Red Wings have speedhooks, either by default or as options if you mail them in/go to a shop, because it can take quite a while to lace them up normally. But the clones might evolve speedhooks which didn't actually hold the laces or which were clamped shut around laces because at some point, someone didn't understand what the point of them was and made a change, and there was no pushback, because no one was actually shucking them on & off enough to care about speedhooks.)

Ah, makes sense. I missed the contrasting. Your bomber jacket is a good example. But I do know professional pilots that wear aviator glasses for functionality. I wonder if anyone in the military does so because of their helmets - but what about non-fighter pilots? Do they have headgear too?