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.”
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