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 fierce sense of purpose inside. The Musée de la Contrefaçon 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-offs 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 falsified 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.
Spot the difference: the invincible business of counterfeit goods – podcastRead more
It’s not just the overall figures that boggle the mind. One French customs raid confiscated 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 identification) 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 difference between the real thing and the fake anyway?
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