Words: Tom Ward
Journey to almost any popular holiday hotspot – from Asia to Europe – and among the sunburned Brits and cheap booze, you’ll notice one other constant: knock-off designer goods, often in the form of purses or man bags. How these items continue to be sold, year after year, without the likes of Gucci, Chanel or Louis Vuitton stepping in to do something about it (not personally, that’d be mad) is a mystery. The thing is, we know these are fakes. The sellers know. And they know we know they know. So really, what’s to be done?
But it isn’t just a problem in holiday hotspots, but here at home, too, as Morwenna Ferrier points out in an investigation for the Guardian: “Around a third of us will end up buying a fake in the UK, knowingly or not,” she writes, claiming the problem is second only to drugs in terms of criminal cash to be earned, “it’s thought 42m fakes were seized as they entered the country in 2021,” Ferrier writes, “of which, according to not-for-profit trade organisation the Anti-Counterfeiting Group (ACG), 3m fell under fashion and accessories.”
To answer that question of why isn’t anything being done, Ferrier spoke to Phil Lewis, director general of the ACG, who claims the brands themselves simply “don’t care” about the knockoff goods. But there’s a darker side than your partner receiving a knock-off bag, or your old man ending up with a fugazi Rolex. Lewis points to links to human trafficking, labour exploitation and child labour in the knock-off fashion trade. “When you’re moving that number of goods and looking at the multibillion profit involved, the links between large-scale domestic production and organised crime are irrefutable,” he tells Ferrier, who recounts her own tale of buying a £250 Acne Studios bag for £22 and receiving no reply after she pointed out the obviously shoddy quality to the seller – including irregularities in the font print size. Fake goods have even been linked to terrorism.
According to Statista, the pandemic had a massive impact on how we shop, with online shopping becoming the main form of spending for 75 percent of us (up from 40 percent), which means there’s a lot of clothes being sold sight-unseen, and a lot of potential for dodgy items to slip under the radar. Many sites don’t even hide it. Google ‘knockoff mens clothes’ and some of the top results include the website Temu promising “Fake clothes up to 90% off” and Etsy offering “Fake designer clothing.”
To find out more about knock-offs, Ferrier visited a purposefully nondescript, vault-like warehouse near Gatwick airport, from which Bill Porter runs Vestiaire Collective, a company set up to check the veracity of everything from Helmut Lang tux jackets to Grenson loafers. It is from here that Porter and his colleagues can – should you so wish – check out any inexpensively purchased items and tell you if you’ve been had. There are 23 authenticators here, many veterans from fashion museums and auction houses. At Christmas, this office alone can receive 1000 items per day, and there are also officers in Hong Kong, Seoul, Brooklyn, and France.
“Hermès, Gucci and Louis Vuitton will always be the most counterfeited but always at a high quality,” a trusted authenticator, Justine Bammez, tells Ferrier. “It can be incredibly hard to tell.”Bammez checks every facet of an item to distinguish its authenticity. In a beautiful bit of detail she explains to Ferrier that “[real] Hermès smells soft and smoky, Gucci more like wood”. It’s exactly these markers of quality that give an item its value in the first place.
The Vestiaire Collective has its hands full, and the brands themselves may not care, but in the UK at least, law enforcement are cracking down. In the last two weeks a “fake logo” factory was raided in Manchester, with officers making one arrest and unearthing large amounts of cash and counterfeit clothes. In the same period, a man was arrested in Glasgow after cops found half a million pounds worth of fake clothing in his home. Meanwhile, the middle class enclave of Bury St Edmunds saw a market stall raided by Trading Standards.
All of this pales into a join operation between the Spanish National Police and Greece’s Hellenic Police with support from the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). Between March and December 2022, Operation Fake Star, the first EU-wide operation against the illegal trade in counterfeit apparel, footwear and accessories, made 378 arrests, seizing two million fakes across 17 countries.
So, next time you’re tempted by a discount just remember, if not you, someone will be paying the very real, very human cost of fake goods sooner rather than later.
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