I think the best strategy with fashion is to stick to as low a budget versions as possible. Fashion is pretty much a throw-away industry anyway and it's very easy to make "mistakes" in clothes shopping, too. The good news is that fashion design isn't exactly copyrightable and high prices fashion items are usually immediately copied into low-priced versions. And, of course, thanks to eBay it's often easy to locate second hand items through a precise search. If you run in my social circle you don't hang out with celebrities or people who care about cutting edge fashion anyway.
