The Delta chair is just different enough that Emeco can’t go after them but he still believes them to be knockoffs. Sure, they took out the crossbar, but the butt divot is still there… and they even kept the signature welds on the back of the vertical bars.

Christopher Sprigman wrote a book called the Knockoff Economy in which he argues that lookalikes and fakes are actually a net good for society. The Emeco Navy chair costs over $500 — not a seat for the masses. The knockoffs are democratizing, allowing for regular people to make similar aesthetic choices to rich people.

But how real is this knockoff? To find out, I decided to use the same test that won over the Navy… the throwing-it-off-an-eight-story-building-story test. It didn’t do well.