Step aside Balenciaga, IKEA’s very own towel skirt has arrived

Are you looking for a cheaper alternative to Balenciaga’s Towel Skirt? Can’t figure out how else to wrap a towel around your waist and call it fashion? IKEA has you covered.

The skirt, which arrived on Balenciaga’s website for £695, is finally available to pre-order after it was showcased during the luxury label’s Spring 2024 presentation at Paris Fashion Week earlier this year. Yep, that’s right, to get yourself a towel that you can wear anywhere, you can just pay over 100 times the price of a normal towel.

IKEA, in response, hilariously highlighted its own VINARN bath towel through their UK Instagram, featuring a model striking a pose similar to the one featured on Balenciaga’s store website. The post says the towel skirt goes for £16, but the towel itself actually goes for a mere £10 on the furniture retailer’s website. Either way, it’s hard to call IKEA’s version a “dupe”—it definitely serves more as an affordable alternative.

Balenciaga is no stranger to releasing unconventional items, but it’s also not their first time colliding with IKEA on similar products. In 2017, Balenciaga released their take on IKEA’s infamous blue FRAKTA tote bag, the former retailing at £1,105 compared to the latter’s £1 price tag. However, while the price of Balenciaga’s Towel Skirt isn’t unheard of for what reads to normal people as a luxury novelty product, it does go against what Demna, the house’s creative director, said in an interview with Vogue in the wake of last year’s ad scandal. 

Demna, who has been at the helm of Balenciaga since 2015, said that he would practice “a more mature and serious approach” in designing future collections and not create products for “image or buzz.”

Although an extortionately priced towel doesn’t exactly come across as mature, right?