Spot the di erence: the invincible business of counterfeit goods

Selling cheap fakes of a successful product makes horribly good business sense. Is there any way
to stop it?

I was standing in front of an imposing townhouse in the swish 16th arrondissement of Paris. Its
classical lines, marble staircases and delicately wrought iron balustrades belied the erce sense of purpose
inside. The Mus e de la Contrefa on is an unusual kind of museum – it specialises in counterfeits. I hoped
that my visit would help me understand a problem that luxury brands have been battling for decades: that
of mass-market knock-o s and blatant counterfeits.

According to some estimates, the trade in fake products is worth $600bn per year. As many as 10%
of all branded goods sold may be counterfeit. It is estimated that 80% of us have handled fake or falsi ed
goods (whether wittingly or not). Sales of luxury goods have soared in recent decades, but fakes have
grown even faster: one estimate suggests that counterfeits have increased by 10,000% in two decades.

It’s not just the overall gures that boggle the mind. One French customs raid con scated enough
fake Louis Vuitton fabric to cover 54 tennis courts. A swoop on a seller on the online Chinese shopping
platform Taobao netted 18,500 counterfeit bags, aprons and footwear. A bust in Madrid impounded 85,000
counterfeits ready for the Black Friday and Christmas markets. In Istanbul, in 2020, almost 700,000
counterfeit haircare products were seized.

Usually, when there are many more counterfeits than the real thing, you see a correction of some
kind. But despite the growth of an authentication industry with an ever-expanding list of anti-counterfeiting
tools – thermally activated tamper-proof seals, security numbers, RFID (radio frequency identi cation) tags,
colour-shifting inks, holograms – that doesn’t seem to be happening. I wanted to make sense of this
discrepancy. Why can’t the designers and the big brands stop, or at least slow down the counterfeiters?
And how do you tell the di erence between the real thing and the fake anyway?

In the Mus e de la Contrefa on there is a typically French answer to that question: glass vitrines
displaying products and their counterfeits side by side, helpfully labelled  vrai  and  faux. I looked at what
seemed to be the famous quilted 2.55 Chanel handbag. In fact, the tour guide told me, it was a Turkish-
made knocko . Where the original boasts regular and robust stitching, the fake was glued together. The
signature quilting was made of cardboard and cotton wool. At rst sight, a Korean bag looked just like a
Louis Vuitton; on closer examination, I noticed that the distinctive trefoils had been replaced by a circle and
a bar, the LV logo by some super cially similar characters in Hangul, the Korean alphabet. Not a single
element of the design matched the original, yet the overall e ect was unmistakably “Vuitton”. The guide
explained that this illustrates the di erence between fakery by imitation and fakery by “passing o ”. Another
cabinet held a 2,000-year-old Gaulish fake of a Roman amphora; what should be a Roman name on the
stopper was replaced by random symbols. I got the feeling that the museum sta were quite proud that
their oldest fake was made on French territory.

Rather unstylishly, I was carrying my notebook, wallet and keys in a supermarket plastic bag.
Leaving the hotel earlier that day, I had realised at the last minute that my shoulder bag was a fake
Longchamp. In the museum the guide showed me the real thing. On mine, the little gold tchotchke  that
hung o the zip was a plain gold ring, where it should have been a leaping Longchamp horse and jockey.
The inside of mine lacked the deliciously thick, rubbery, almost sticky quality of the genuine article.
Compared to the real thing, the leather on my bag was oddly spongy and insubstantial, the stitching
inadequate.

I asked the guide about the building. Was it true that it was a copy of an earlier 17th-century one in
the Marais district? Did that mean – oh, the delicious irony – that the museum was itself housed in a
counterfeit? The guide’s eyes narrowed slightly. I sensed a  froideur. “It’s a copy, not a counterfeit. Where
there is no IP, no counterfeit is possible.”

Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/may/10/spot-the-di erence-the-invincible-business-

of-counterfeit-goods

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