Lauren Ralph Lauren Bedding Poet's Society RUG Euro Pillow Sham ~ European

The real Ralph Lauren Poets Society collection is beautiful and I highly recommend it if you are even considering the pattern. I am totally satisfied with the Euro shams I bought that were genuine.

That being said, these were sold as a set of two, and I'm pretty sure that one of them was either a fake or the one that the new guy on the Ralph Lauren production line made--at 3 in the morning--while drunk. Reasons I say this:

1. SIZE: The genuine article is a standard Euro sham size; the alleged fake is smaller in each dimension, and not by the same amount. As in, one of these was a square (as a Euro pillow should be) and the other was just slightly a rectangle--by about half an inch.

2. FABRIC QUALITY: Not so much that a poor fabric was used--it looks like the genuine stuff. It's just that one side of this appears to be sewn on "wrong side" out. This means that one side of the sham appears looks faded. This could potentially also be an off-spec dye lot, but not very likely.

3. ORIENTATION: The person that created the alleged fake did not have great spatial relationship skills. One of the pieces is turned 90 degrees relative to the other, so that if you place this sham in a row with genuine articles in the same orientation, when you flip them over, the pattern goes one way on the real ones and a different way on the alleged fake.

4. TAILORING: Or lack thereof. The zipper was sewn with the "tail" on the outside. When you sew a zipper into a pillow sham, there should be a 1 inch strip of the zipper left on the inside of the sham. The alleged fake has a 6 inch tail left on the outside. At first glance, you would swear it's inside out, but the cording is all right; the zipper's just done wrong.

5. PACKAGING: Authentic, but obviously had been opened.

6. LABEL: Too long, in the wrong place with respect to the zipper.

However, despite the ugly duckling of the pair, it turns out that I only needed three, and having bought a pair of genuine pieces from another retailer, I can afford to swallow the cost of the fake and go on with life. Incidentally, the genuine Ralph Lauren sham was quite beautiful and matched the comforter perfectly. The fake would get 1 star, the real thing would get 5, so on average, not so bad.

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