Lululemon has a dupe problem. This counterfeit brand is the funniest

Hey, there! The world is at war. We all want to reach some inner peace. Maybe you, too, have tried yoga. But what if the world’s most visible yoga brand is actually anti-yoga!? Not a great look!

Nikita Desai, a London-based yoga instructor and educator, landed in our @anxiety.eco inboxes this week with this statement: “Lululemon is a global athleisure brand that has built much of its identity around yoga. From a genuinely yogic perspective, a commitment to wellbeing and fairness would require meaningful steps toward accountability, cultural respect, and more inclusive representation.” 

So, for the past week, JD has been doing something they don’t usually do: athleisure. Darling! 

Yes, JD has been speaking with campaigners about one of the funniest creative campaigns about sustainability in a fashion context in recent memory. Amy and JD showed up for a satirical brand’s “launch” in Central London yesterday. Then we contacted Lululemon for answers about its environmental failures. (That is, wink, why we’re reader funded.)

On this first weekend of Earth Month, we’re sharing a long-read feature diving into the death of sustainability campaigning as we’ve known it, and how a Lululemon dupe shows us one fresh way forward.

Thanks to our Founding Members! You made it possible for JD to write this week’s feature.

JD and Amy

In the post-lockdown 2020s, “IRL” has become a funny trend. More people try to log off and touch grass. So it’s not surprising to see fashion brands transforming their storefronts into event spaces in a bid to compete with online ultra fast fashion retailers like Shein, Temu and Amazon Haul. Athleisure giants, in particular, sell some corporatised vision of that groan-worthy buzzword “community,” with their slick classes and run clubs popping up to bring brand loyalists into their shops. On first glance, then, the fully booked yoga class happening this afternoon at a compact, minimalist storefront on Central London’s Paddington Street isn’t that unusual.

Here in the well-heeled Marylebone neighbourhood, pricey athleisure is part of the uniform. One guy wearing head-to-toe Lululemon wanders into the shop. Inside, a social media influencer leads attendees, who pose on their sweaty mats. Along the walls around them, typical-looking yoga gear hangs on a few sparse racks. It could appear as if Lululemon had opened a new shop, though the brand’s own storefront is fewer than 50 yards away. So as our Lululemon fan scans the stretchy yoga sets and branded hoodies, he does a double-take. The wordmark on all the gear reads, ahem, Mumumelon.

Mumumelon is anything but the first Lululemon dupe. They are, in fact, so widespread that the brand itself secured the trademark “LULULEMON DUPE” in the United States in October 2025, allowing it to legally challenge influencers, TikTok shops and copycat retailers using the phrase to market competitors’ products.

But Mumumelon isn’t like other dupes, because the apparent infringement on Lululemon’s brand is not a sales tactic. You can’t actually buy any of the merchandise in this shop, open for two days only this week to the press and passersby. “Violating copyright, not the planet,” the dupe brand’s tagline reads in the window. Mumumelon instead demonstrates how Lululemon could actually live up to its mindfulness branding by being “less terrible” for the planet. That’s according to Oli Frost, the self-described “Chief Counterfeit Officer” at Mumumelon, who speaks to a small crowd during a soft-drinks reception after the yoga class.

Frost lists off a series of things that Lululemon could accomplish with its considerable financial resources to decarbonise its supply chain: supporting suppliers to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, investing in electrification and heat pumps. The kind of climate solutions that already exist, even though the wealthiest brands choose not to invest in them and instead funnel those profits to their shareholders. Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon, is one of the wealthiest men in fashion and among the more than 80 fashion billionaires we tracked in the Ultra-Rich List: we estimated his wealth in January to be between $7 and $8 billion US. A garment worker earning Bangladesh’s minimum wage would need almost 7 million years to earn the same amount.

Lululemon might choose to implement none of the solutions and instead “sue-sue us,” Frost acknowledges, to which he adds: bring on the “lululawyers!” The shop erupts in laughter and applause, and then I flip through the racks.

Mumumelon is, on its face, a satirical campaign from climate creative studio Serious People in collaboration with not-for-profit Action Speaks Louder. Frost is a familiar face in climate circles for his viral content, which has included getting Greta Thunberg dancing the macarena to a song about her. He co-founded Serious People in 2024, and they’ve run campaigns such as Oilwell, a spoof meditation app, that go to comically absurd lengths to show how ridiculous climate inaction really is. This is the first one they’ve run targeting a fashion brand, and it arrives at a time when much of the sustainability conversation in the industry lacks teeth, through factors ranging from defunding to a consumer “empowerment” message trapped in the 2010s.

Mumumelon functions as a case study that focuses on solutions rather than merely calling out the big, bad brands: its small run of real products were all manufactured with 100% renewable energy, demonstrating what brands could achieve if they actually tried. Another way Mumumelon is different from other campaigns in this space? It’s actually funny.

“The standard way of campaigning is to highlight everything that a brand is doing wrong,” Frost tells me. “In satire, you can do a more honest version of the brand, an exaggerated version of the brand, pretend to be the brand. We thought: what if we pretend to be the brand, but just do something better than them? We’re presenting the solution rather than presenting the problem.”

Lululemon’s original brand manifesto contains the line, “What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves.” 

The company ought to sit with that for a moment.

It has announced more than $11 billion in 2025 revenue. Its greenhouse gas emissions have ballooned to more than 1.6 million tonnes: a 14% increase from the previous year. And according to Action Speaks Louder, the brand has backslid on earlier commitments, removing time-bound supply chain renewable electricity targets from its corporate website. After months of dialogue between the campaigners and Lululemon’s leadership, the brand still has no credible, money-backed plan to transition its supply chain from fossil fuels to clean energy.

The gap between stated goals and action runs deeper than emissions data, though. Yoga instructor, educator and author Nikita Desai, who modelled for the Mumumelon campaign, puts it plainly in a statement: 

For a brand that positions itself around yoga, Desai argues, accountability would mean reconsidering its name, and bringing more voices from yoga’s source culture into leadership, decision-making and marketing representation. The campaign intentionally spotlighted South Asian yoga influencers for precisely this reason.

Good On You, the independent brand sustainability ratings platform, gives Lululemon a Planet score of just 2 out of 5: “Not Good Enough.” Dr Kate Hobson-Lloyd, the organisation’s sustainability manager, says plainly that the brand “isn’t advancing as well as comparable brands with higher scores” on environmental topics. And the pattern she sees across the wider industry is instructive for understanding how brands like Lululemon operate. 

Companies that appear to be struggling to meet emissions targets will sometimes readjust them to make them more achievable, which Hobson-Lloyd calls “a red flag, because it can feel like the brand wants to be able to say it has met a target, when the target might not have been all that ambitious to begin with.”

It’s also common, she notes, for brands to trumpet meeting their Scope 1 and 2 targets, which are the easiest ones to meet because they don’t account for supply chain emissions outside of a brand’s direct control. 

Far less common is a brand that’s actually on track to meet its Scope 3 targets, the ones that cover where the clothes are actually made.

So the yoga brand selling inner peace is, to put it delicately, not practising what it preaches.

Ruth MacGilp, fashion campaigns manager at Action Speaks Louder, has been trying to get fashion brands to act on their supply chain emissions for a long time: petitions, open letters, billboards, influencer collaborations, and so on. “Everything under the sun,” as she puts it. “But what we’ve seen throughout this [Lululemon] campaign is sometimes incremental change, mostly delays and deflection.” 

She’d have a right to be tired. Mumumelon was born out of that frustration, but also out of a deliberate strategic choice. Rather than pour more criticism onto the brand, MacGilp wanted to demonstrate what’s possible. The campaign produced 43 real products, sourced from suppliers running on 100% renewable electricity, on a shoestring budget and in about three months. 

They’re not claiming this equals sustainable manufacturing. They’re saying that on this specific, measurable indicator, a non-profit proved in weeks what a company worth billions says it cannot do.

“We’re not saying it’s 100% possible today to switch overnight to a fully electric supply chain, because it’s not,” MacGilp tells me. “But we’re saying you need a plan at a minimum.” The Mumumelon website goes further than the satire, too: it includes a plan to fully electrify the fake brand’s supply chain by 2040, drafted as though Mumumelon were a real company mapping its transition off fossil fuels.

“If we, as a fake brand on a shoestring budget, can do this, why can’t a brand that made $11 billion last year do even a fraction of it?” MacGilp asks. It’s the kind of question that ought to embarrass somebody. 

In February, Remake, the non-profit behind the #PayUp campaign that recovered billions in stolen garment worker wages during COVID, shuttered citing a sharp decline in funding for labour and climate justice work. It’s one of several sustainability-focused organisations that have closed or scaled back in recent months, part of what MacGilp describes as a funding landscape that is “pretty dire right now.” 

But the crisis in so-called sustainable fashion runs deeper than money. And Mumumelon, for all its comedy, raises questions the movement has been avoiding.

The decade of activism that followed the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013 achieved important things, making millions of people ask #WhoMadeMyClothes and engaging a generation with the realities of colonialism embedded in global supply chains. 

The campaigns that produced durable wins during that period shared certain qualities: they were honest about power, specific in their demands, and focused in their targets. 

But somewhere along the way, the language of “sustainable fashion” became so diffuse that it could mean anything from a fast fashion brand’s hangtag reading “eco-collection” to a living-wage campaign backed by years of organising. 

When a phrase means everything, it means almost nothing. And when movements become that broad and vague, they get absorbed into the corporate ESG/DEI/CSR alphabet soup, which has proven remarkably skilled at producing greenwashed statements of change that don’t actually change anything.

The consumer-facing message got muted, too. “Shop better.” “For people and planet.” “Vote with your wallet.” These slogans carried real energy in the 2010s, and they genuinely broadened public awareness of fashion’s harms. 

But boycotts throughout history have succeeded when they were specific and targeted, not diffuse. Telling millions of individuals to make slightly more ethical purchasing decisions, while the entire market is structured to push them toward cheap disposable clothing — and the legacy media ecosystem tells them they need more of it — was never going to reshape an industry controlled by billionaires.

MacGilp gestures towards this. “The era of choosing better, shopping better: we know that hasn’t had results,” she tells me. “What we need is strategic action to move power to the people who need it: workers, suppliers, communities. And to pressure those who do hold the power, corporations, policymakers, investors, to make different decisions.” 

All good campaigning, MacGilp underscores, begins with a question of power: who holds it, and how do you move it.

As Amy Miles wrote for anxiety.eco earlier this year, decarbonising fashion is not a pipe dream; it requires a series of almost boring investments. Fashion Revolution’s What Fuels Fashion report has shown repeatedly that fossil-fuelled boilers still dominate the dyehouses, laundries and finishing mills where our clothes are made. The clean alternatives already exist. The money to fund them exists in the system too, as we documented in our Ultra-Rich List tracking more than $1.5 trillion in wealth across 80-plus fashion billionaires.

“What we need are things that companies can’t backtrack on, and one of those things is building energy infrastructure,” MacGilp says. “It’s not a ‘conscious collection’; it's not a target or a policy on the website; it’s the decommissioning of fossil fuel boilers and the installation of solar panels: that’s tangible hardware.”

What she is describing, and what Mumumelon embodies in miniature, is a shift from awareness to accountability: “Up until this point, it’s been all about awareness building. We still haven’t transitioned to solutions. As a movement, we really need to get strategic – fast – and scrutinise whether these changes are happening on the ground.” 

Sustainable fashion as a movement didn’t fail entirely, to be sure, but the era of awareness for its own sake has ended. The groundwork it laid matters. What’s needed now is a reckoning with what organising actually means: honesty about power first, then specific demands aimed at that power, then demonstrated solutions with public attention built around them to create consensus.

Satire alone won’t deliver that. But when it’s paired with honesty about power and specific demands linked to solutions that already exist? That could be what’s been missing.

Sustainable fashion, it turns out, has a humour problem. 

Consider this gem: in January, Patagonia, the outdoor apparel company that claims to be ”in business to save our home planet”, filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Pattie Gonia.

If you don’t know her, Pattie Gonia is the drag name of Wyn Wiley, an environmental activist who uses performance and comedy to advocate for climate action and LGBTQ+ inclusion in the outdoors. She’s raised more than a million dollars for environmental non-profits. Patagonia sued her for a nominal $1 in damages and an injunction to stop her using the name, arguing that her branded merchandise and trademark application posed “long-term threats to Patagonia’s brand and our activism.” 

The brand most closely associated with environmentalism in apparel went to court to shut down … a drag queen climate activist riffing on its name. 

That says something about how this industry relates to critique, and to comedy in particular. Fashion’s sustainability conversation has been so relentlessly earnest for so long that even gentle satire from an apparent ally gets lawyered. No wonder the discourse feels stuck.

Thankfully, Frost has gone his entire career without a single take-down letter. “Brands should be aware that taking legal action will likely draw more attention to our campaign,” he tells me with a shrug.

He didn’t arrive at climate campaigning through any grand theory about the power of satire. He was making satirical internet projects well before he pivoted to climate, and he applied the skill he already had to the problem that felt most urgent. 

His argument isn’t that everyone should become satirists. “If everyone who gets involved in climate does something they know how to do, that’s more valuable than trying to do something you’re not good at,” he says. 

For Frost, satire is simply the thing he’s good at. But he’s also real about why it keeps working where other approaches stall. “It would have been very easy for us to create our own greenwash, a brand that says ‘we’re better for the planet,’” he says. “It would have been all too easy to fall into the trap of what we’re criticising. That’s why the trademark infringement takes centre stage in the messaging.” 

The absurdity is the point. A purely positive climate message, he argues, provokes cynicism because people aren’t used to good news without a catch. “If there’s no rub in it, if the campaign doesn’t have some badness in it, people aren’t likely to accept it as real.”

The “badness” of Mumumelon (the copyright violation, the fake brand conceit, the cheeky proximity to Lululemon’s own storefront) is what gives the positive message underneath it permission to land. The rub is the vehicle. Without it, you’re just another brand saying “for people and planet” on a hangtag, and we’ve all learned to tune that out.

None of this guarantees that Lululemon will respond. We reached out to Lululemon for comment: 

We’ll update this paragraph if they reply, but we don’t expect them to (this, after all, is what reader-funded media makes possible). Brands typically try to avoid engaging with campaigns like these, because engagement creates a story. 

The funding crisis for sustainability organisations is real, yes, and the systems that got us here haven’t changed. But something is beginning to shift in how this conversation happens: specific where the movement has been vague, funny where it has been earnest, and grounded in proof where it has relied on pledges. 

Whether that’s enough remains to be seen, but Mumumelon is, at a minimum, the funniest of accountability campaigning in recent memory. That means something.

“It’s totally ridiculous that we have to resort to humour to make people think about the only planet we have to live on,” Frost tells me. “That’s the situation we’re in.”