Acceptance of the ersatz
Today’s culture is one of a global culture of counterfeit, or an acceptance of the ersatz. That there is a black market for counterfeit goods isn't surprising. After all, forgery was a sufficient problem in the 1800s that Louis Vuitton’s grandson revamped their designs in an attempt to combat it. What we should really wonder is what is behind a desire to be fake, such that women are proud of that they haven’t bought the real goods as described in The Cut’s 2022 article on the rise of counterfeit goods among supposedly-affluent Manhattanites.
The morality of purchasing these goods is questionable, even for those who normally maintain that the market as a concept is a moral good. Most people who love liberty would refuse to give money to a totalitarian party. Yet, that is who is enriched by the flow of counterfeit luxury goods, which mostly originate from China, as reported by journalist Dana Thomas over ten years ago in 2008 in her book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre. Even more chilling are her accounts of sweatshops in non-Communist countries where children work as slave laborers, creating the objects needed for Western women to play out their fantasies of being grand ladies. A Western counterfeit investigator told Thomas,
I remember walking into an assembly plant in Thailand a couple of years ago [the early 2000s] and seeing six or seven little children, all under ten years old, sitting on the floor assembling counterfeit leather handbags. The owner had broken the children’s legs and tied the lower leg to the thigh so the bones wouldn’t mend. He did it because the children said they wanted to go outside and play.
To make matters worse, these bags are sold at the “purse-parties” described by Thomas in 2008 and The Cut in 2022 where they “seem so innocuous that churches, synagogues, and schools host purse parties to raise money for charities or in-house events." The Cut article focused on New York City, but Thomas's research indicates that the problem of "purse-parties" pushing counterfeit goods is endemic to the Western world, with Thomas even stating “Purse-party ladies are the drug dealers of the counterfeit trade; they buy from the wholesalers and sell to suburban users, folks with a craving for the goods but not enough dough for the genuine thing.” Further, law enforcement officials interviewed by Thomas confirmed that a significant part of global terrorist networks' funding comes from counterfeiting luxury goods.
In comparison, as described in economist Don Thompson's 2022 book The Curious Economics of Luxury Fashion: Millennials, Influencers, and A Pandemic, the genuine luxury houses maintain complete control over their production lines, from crocodile farms in Australia (Louis Vuitton) to employing highly skilled artisans in workshops based in Europe (Hermès). The control and expertise is what one is buying when one purchases a genuine article — along with some certainty that one's bag was not made by a prepubescent child with untreated broken limbs.
The fakery of bragging about obtaining counterfeit goods is not conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption is the example cited by Thomas of Cicero commissioning a table to be made from a rare citron wood to show his new wealth. Conspicuous consumption is Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged buying Dagny Taggert expensive gems of unimpeachable veracity. The passing of a knockoff as the real item, whether for profit or for social status, is simply dishonesty.
Recalling his childhood and his parents and grandparents’ refusals to allow him to buy two two-cent ice cream cones, though they allowed him to buy a four-cent piece of ice cream pie, Umberto Eco wrote:
I realize that those dear and now departed elders were right. Two two-cent cones instead of one at four cents did not signify squandering, economically speaking, but symbolically they surely did. It was for this precise reason that I yearned for them: because two ice creams suggested excess. And this was precisely why they were denied me: because they looked indecent, an insult to poverty, a display of fictitious privilege, a boast of wealth. […] And parents who encouraged this weakness, appropriate to little parvenus, were bringing up their children in the foolish theatre of “I’d like to but I can’t.” They were preparing them to turn up at tourist-class check-in with a fake Gucci bag bought from a street peddler on the beach at Rimini.
A further development of “the foolish theatre of ‘I’d like to but I can’t’” is that a person “cannot” because she is not. There is nothing wrong with working hard and saving money for a designer bag, or coming from enough wealth to indulge in one without the working and saving steps. Both of these approaches are honest and are therefore dignified. On the other hand, there is a problem with cutting corners, with being fictitious, because it is dishonest, and therefore dishonorable. The first approach has integrity; the second is antithetical to lady-like behavior. Comparatively, there is less damage wrought by an oligarch or a dictator’s wife buying genuine designer goods than there is by the suburban wives of The Cut article buying their knockoffs. Although the first situation can be a form of money laundering, it is at the very least clean on the supply side. The second situation cannot be justified.