Counterfeited Goods

Historically, counterfeit goods—goods that are made to imitate designer or high-end goods—have been used to artificially raise one's social standing. To be seen, by others, to be in possession of a Gucci handbag, a Warhol silkscreen, or an Armani Collezioni jacket (three areas in which counterfeit goods are currently rife) is understood to evidence wealth and good taste and an informed appreciation of quality, artistry, tradition, and craftsmanship. Thus, when the goods are understood to have been counterfeited, and so bought “on the cheap,” the owners' taste is revealed to be only deceptively intimated, as is their wealth, and with an appreciation of tradition and craftsmanship revealed to be little more than a sham. The ready availability of such “knock off” goods, via Internet sites or from the vendors in street markets (so that buying a fake Louis Vuitton belt for a few dollars or [Page 372]euros while on vacation is almost de rigueur) means that the designer look, if not the authentic designer item itself, is attainable for all. Thus, the goods are no longer the exclusive preserve of those with the social cachet and finance to gain entry to the inner sanctums of the most upscale shops.

However, any social faux pas that arises from the use of counterfeited goods has come to be undermined by the nature and origins of the authentic goods: when the “real thing” itself is seen to be of a problematic status, the denigration of the fake version would seem to be made in bad faith. In her 2008 book Deluxe, Dana Thomas argued that the quality and craftsmanship of luxurious goods has waned as newly wealthy middle classes began to seek out an array of affordable, designer-branded status symbols for their domestic spheres. In their full capitalization on this newly emergent market, manufacturers moved further toward mass production, even to the point of many designer items assembled in sweat shops of developing worlds—indeed in the very same areas, possibly by the very same hands, where their counterfeit versions also originate. This capitalization arose through an acceptance of a new market regime for designer brands: a paradigm of straight supply and demand over exclusivity and limited editions, with the typical suppression of manufacturing costs, and with the brand name, and upholding the status of the brand name, as now secondary to generating profit.

Two problems have arisen with respect to this market-driven democratization. First, the imperatives of lowered overheads via cheaper labor overwhelmed traditional, old-world craftsmanship: hand-tooled gave way to the factory line, and ethical questions of child labor (see Pilger's investigation into such developing world assembly lines, for example, in The New Rulers of the World) undid ideas of taste and quality. Second, following Jean Baudrillard's account of simulacrum, where the brand name itself is understood to have supplanted the product descriptors and, as discussed by Naomi Klein, where it is understood that it is the brand rather than the item that is sold, the dissolution of designer brand name exclusivity has proven to have been near fatal.

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