‘Hermès smells soft and smoky, Gucci more like wood’:
how fake hunters tell designer knock-offs from the real deal
With fashion lovers increasingly turning to secondhand
luxury, bogus goods are rife. But at what cost?
Morwenna
Ferrier
Sat 5 Aug
2023 06.00 EDT
The
rainbow-checked scarf arrives on time, by post, in a Ziploc bag. The tag reads
Acne Studios, a high-end Swedish label, but the wording looks … off. I send a
photo to a typographer friend. “It’s pretty obvious it’s fake,” she says. “Look
at the e and s – they’re different fonts.” Inside, the washing label advises
“dry cean only”. I squeeze it. It feels genuine – not unlike the £250 bouncy
wool and mohair real thing. But it’s not. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for the £22
I spent. I email the seller and point out the discrepancies. There’s no reply.
This was
not my first fake. In my 20s, I went to Vietnam and returned with a “Chanel”
2.55 handbag and two “Kipling” holdalls bought from Ho Chi Minh City’s Ben
Thanh market, famous for its rich pho soup and cheap knockoffs. Before that,
aged 18, it was “Ralph Lauren” shirts with skewwhiff jockey logos from
Bangkok’s MBK Center. To me they were all obvious fakes. With the scarf, I
thought I’d bagged a bargain. I had been fooled.
Around a
third of us will end up buying a fake in the UK, knowingly or not. Today’s
counterfeit problem is second only to drugs in terms of criminal income: it’s
thought 42m fakes were seized as they entered the country in 2021, of which,
according to not-for-profit trade organisation the Anti-Counterfeiting Group
(ACG), 3m fell under fashion and accessories. And if that doesn’t sound like
much, that’s because it isn’t: not every counterfeit is caught, not every
person who buys one would admit to it, and since we left the EU, “we simply haven’t
had the same level of regulation of what comes in”, says Phil Lewis, director
general of the ACG. His biggest hurdle is people believing that the only
victims are the brands. “They just don’t care,” he says with a sigh.
Hermès, Gucci and Louis Vuitton are the most
counterfeited and at such high quality, it can be incredibly hard to tell
But
counterfeit fashion goes beyond sticking it to the conglomerates. This
so-called “dark trade” has links to human trafficking, labour exploitation and
child labour, and you don’t need Europol to tell you that, Lewis says. “When
you’re moving that number of goods and looking at the multibillion profit
involved, the links between large-scale domestic production and organised crime
are irrefutable.” Olivia Windham Stewart, a human rights specialist, agrees:
the human cost of a fake Birkin bag is “very significant” and “largely hidden”.
Looking for
more clues, I logged on to where I’d bought the scarf and found four more;
another site had three. I was embarrassed. Given how easy it is to buy a fake –
no checks, no regulation, no vetting, and good enough to fool me, a fashion
editor – the number changing hands must be considerably higher than 3m. How can
we tell what is real or fake? Can anyone be sure?
Bill Porter
stretches out his hand. “Welcome to Crawley,” he says. Porter runs the
logistics at Vestiaire Collective’s depot, a former electrical warehouse on an
industrial estate a few miles from Gatwick. There are no windows and no
signage, just a softly spoken security guard, Mr Khan, and a robust alarm
system. It’s near the airport for obvious reasons, and anonymous because inside
are millions of pounds’ worth of luxury goods.
In 2019, I
began shopping for secondhand clothes online, initially on eBay, then Vestiaire
Collective, a fashion platform that launched in 2009 in France and sells
secondhand clothing across the world. It began with the odd pair of Grenson
loafers for £50, a Helmut Lang tux jacket for £20 and a Joseph skirt for even
less. Before long, it was where I bought everything. I knew online shopping for
designer clothing had its risks but Vestiaire had cottoned on to the rise of
fakes early and created a system: buyers could choose to have their item
shipped directly to them or, for £15, an expert would check it first and tell
them if their bag was real. It did this first in France, then as business – and
fakes – began booming in the UK, it started checking whether people like me
were being sold knockoffs here.
The factory
floor of the Crawley warehouse is spotless grey lino divided into sections with
coloured tape, so it almost resembles a crime scene. At one end, thousands of
colourful boxes of designer items are stacked up like irregular bricks within
ceiling-height racks from which Marc Jacobs bags, Jimmy Choo heels and Louis
Vuitton purses spill out. In front are racks of Burberry coats and pillowy
Self-Portrait dresses. These arrive in large vans each morning and enter the
vast, buzzy warehouse via a corrugated side door. Every 20 minutes, the
cacophony is broken by a jumpy four-second alarm as a new delivery arrives. The
23 workers stop what they’re doing; only when the door is locked does
everything start up again. This is where the fake hunters do their thing.
Every time
a Ganni skirt or Raey T-shirt arrived at my flat, with a tag signed by one of
them, I wondered who these people were. Known as “authenticators”, some come
from fashion museums and auction houses; some have worked in the actual brand’s
factories; others are simply fashion nerds. Vestiaire Collective’s application
process is rigorous. Candidates are tested on their fashion knowledge, then
trained for three months by specialists from Tourcoing in France, where the
company HQ is. They have to know about leather and embossing methods, but also
when Hedi Slimane removed the accent from Celine, when Nike collaborated with
Tiffany and how much Demna tweaked the font size when he joined Balenciaga.
“Hermès, Gucci and Louis Vuitton will always be the most counterfeited but
always at a high quality,” says a leading authenticator, Justine Bammez. “It
can be incredibly hard to tell.”
When the
warehouse opened in January 2022, it was receiving 30 packages a day, sent from
customer to customer. By Christmas, they expect to receive 1,000 a day. People
tend to shop over holidays; after the spring bank holiday, 700 items turned up
on one day. “That was a good test,” Porter says. “We just about passed.”
There are
60 fake hunters working for Vestiaire at sites in Hong Kong, Seoul, Brooklyn
and France. A lot of the initial “processing” is automated. “But you couldn’t
use robots in the proper authenticating,” Porter says. “It’s too specialised.”
Just under 70% of what comes in gets checked. Of that, up to 2% is found to be
counterfeit. “If you were going to sell a fake, you probably wouldn’t list it
here,” says Bammez, who runs the authenticating side in Crawley. “But they
still do.”
Owning a fake can be a badge of honour – as if you are
putting two fingers up to the conglomerates who made you want it
No two fake
hunters are alike. Each has their own methodology, background and exacting
superpower. Mayra Afzal, for instance, used to be an aeroplane enthusiast: “I
was into machines, what makes them work, the stuff inside, the sounds.” She
started working in shops at 16, moving on to quality control with big brands
such as Rolex and Omega. “You learn through the job. Watch clientele are very
specific, very picky.”
Afzal is in
her early 30s. She comes to work noticeably smarter than everyone else, usually
in black, her dark hair clipped off her face. Today, in ribbed jacket, pearl
earrings and winged eyeliner, she flips over a Cartier watch with swift, expert
movements. “I’m used to working on a micro scale, looking for needles in
haystacks. But I’m also a magpie – when a watch is ticking properly, it’s like
music to me. I can tell at once if a tick is off,” she says, holding a small
silver Rolex up to her ear. Watching her work, it borders on sorcery. (The
Rolex turns out to be real.)
Bammez, who
is French and in her 30s, runs the operation with quiet poise. She has a degree
in history of art and before coming here two years ago worked in museum
archives. Dressed in a black polo neck and high-waisted silk trousers, she
approaches each check with the unflappable manner of a respected teacher taking
on a difficult class. Wearing white cotton gloves, she opens a Hermès box and
produces a grey Birkin bag selling for around £12k. Holding it up to the light on
her desk, she checks the packaging, the satsuma-tone of the box and that the
little man in the logo has his hand in a pocket: “Some details are harder to
fake and this is one.” Then whether there’s a single stitch running round the
edge, that the lace is cotton and the handles stand up properly. “I know this
by sight now,” Bammez says. “The r in Hermès is the hardest letter to fake, and
a big indicator is the smell.” She holds the bag to her nose (Hermès smells
soft and smoky, Gucci more like wood) before checking it has vertical lines in
the leather (indistinguishable to me). The smaller details need a magnifying
glass. While once you could expect spelling mistakes – Herpes instead of Hermès
stamped across the locket – the hallmarks now are harder to spot. Some sellers
fake invoices, so she has to Google the boutique to see if it exists, and the
care leaflet is the last thing to look at. It’s usually the wording that gives
it away; most items come from outside Europe and, like my “dry cean only”
scarf, the translation isn’t always up to scratch.
When I
first started shopping for secondhand vintage online in my 20s, I wasn’t
seeking out fakes, but I wasn’t actively avoiding them either. “Sounds about
right,” says Matthew Cope, deputy director of IP enforcement at the
Intellectual Property Office (IPO) who tells me it’s the younger generation who
buy the most. “Many do so knowingly, and most don’t care.”
The term
dupe falls into a similar category – but rather than fakes trying to pass as
the real thing, dupes resemble the original. One email I received last week
suggested I “shop the perfect Gucci Dupe at La Redoute”. In May, the athleisure
brand Lululemon became so fed up with having their Align leggings duped, they
hosted a swap: bring in your imitations and get the real thing.
An entire
micro-industry of fakefluencers hawks this stuff on social media: a year before
she appeared on Love Island, then-influencer Molly Mae was directing her
followers to dupes on YouTube. Last summer, a report by the EU IPO showed just
over half of young people in the EU had bought one fake in the last year, many
knowingly. Affordability is key: most said they would give up counterfeits if
the originals were cheaper.
Back when I
was buying fakes, they were souvenirs I could show off to friends, but they
also felt like trophies and buying them enticingly risque. Things have changed,
though, and high fashion has even developed a tolerance for fakes. Tom Ford
once said nothing made him happier than seeing copies of his creations – “That
meant you did the right thing” – while influential left-field designer Dapper
Dan made “mutant versions of haute couture” using logo-emblazoned goods. In
some cases, owning a fake is a badge of honour – as if in buying one you are
putting two fingers up to the conglomerates who made you want it in the first
place. Some actively seek them out. One friend buys fake North Face X Gucci
T-shirts that barely resemble the original. “That’s why I like them,” he says.
“I’d never buy a real designer item.”
Before 2020
and the pandemic, 40% of us shopped online in some capacity. By 2021, that
number had risen to 75%. “It wasn’t just necessities, either. Shopping became
therapeutic – why not buy a £300 ‘Rolex’ if it makes you feel better?” says the
ACG’s Lewis.
The ACG
gathers intelligence about counterfeits and shares it with trading standards,
police and customs. It represents 3,000 brands, from car parts to Chanel. Most
fakes come to the UK by sea freight, but increasingly, smaller items – say, a
couple of T-shirts in a Jiffy bag – arrive by courier or plane. East Midlands
airport is one of the busiest fast parcel hubs, which makes it a target, says
IPO enforcer Cope. The organisation employs one person whose job it is to work
out which parcels need to be inspected. “What they find amounts to £1m a month.
But you have to wonder: how much are we missing?”
Buying and
reselling luxury goods can be a game. For some, they’re having a clear-out,
trying to make money or simply selling things they no longer want, often after
a break-up – which is when many counterfeit items come to light. “It’s the
final blow, really,” Vestiaire’s Porter says. “Imagine breaking up with
someone, then finding out your engagement ring was a fake.”
Sam French
is a fresh-faced graduate who has been working at Vestiaire for just over six
months, and has form when it comes to buying and selling bags. “When I was 16 I
saved up for my first Vuitton bag. When I got bored of it, I decided to sell it
– and made a profit.” As a student, he started buying more bags, which he’d
keep for a bit, then sell. When he graduated, all his friends were in debt –
but he had paid off his loan. “At the end of uni, my parents told me to get a
real job,” he says.
He’s an
expert on vintage Galliano and Tom Ford-era Gucci, vetting about 120 items a
day and talking with quiet authority about the way fakes have improved. “With
sneakers,” he says, shining a light over a Gucci pair, “they’ll be stitched
with a slightly different thread or the turn of the leather in the sole will be
different.”
But if
fakes are getting harder to spot, they’re also becoming more widespread as the
economic situation deteriorates, with mid-level examples on the rise – things
you simply wouldn’t expect to be counterfeited because the profit margin is
nowhere near that of a Birkin bag. Think hair straighteners, luxury skincare
and, increasingly, football shirts.
What’s hot
varies wildly. While Vestiaire Collective’s most in-demand brands now are Louis
Vuitton and Hermès, a designer’s death can lead to a rush on their goods, and
Bammez talks of “trend moments” when labels will see a spike after the Met Gala
or a viral fashion show. That’s when you have to be hyper-vigilant.
Anecdotally,
the biggest change in fakes has been the price. My scarf was 90% cheaper than
the real thing which should have set off alarm bells. Increasingly, though,
counterfeiters will price things just 10% to 20% lower than the RRP, so it
seems a bargain rather than a fake. This has led to more unwitting buyers – and
sellers. And if tracking down these has become a sisyphean task, then DS Andy
Masterson is Sisyphus himself. A polite 37-year-old with fair hair, he does not
look as if he heads up the Disruption and Engagement team in the Police
Intellectual Property Crime Unit, who knock on doors in plainclothes, body
armour and – weather-dependent – City of London police caps to ask tricky questions
of unsuspecting cottage industry criminals.
Masterson
started working on these cases three years ago. They can begin online –
tracking down suspects via goods they are selling on, say, Amazon or Reddit
forums – then go face-to-face. In 2019, he was “following some trainers online”
when he found the seller’s address in Manchester. He and his team turned up at
the woman’s door. “She was very compliant, invited us in and showed us the
stuff. As we were about to leave, she said, ‘Want a look in the shed?’ She
opened it up and inside there was a whole factory.” Unbranded goods were
stacked up at one end – shoes, handbags, all sorts – and labels added in the
middle, with a packing area at the front: “A highly organised, low-level
counterfeit factory.”
Putting the
needle down on a record on a turntable
A year
before, this woman had gone to a market to buy clothes for her sons. (Masterson
doesn’t know if she knew they were fake.) It turned out they were the wrong
size, but without receipts, she couldn’t take them back, “so it was suggested
she sell them online. She made a bit of money, so went back and bought some
more.” The seller suggested she buy in bulk, “then buy the labels separately so
she could make them herself”, and so began her little Build-A-Bag business.
Only when an item is “labelled” does it becomes counterfeit; before that it’s
just a bag, and “in her mind it was just a small business”, Masterson says. The
woman was issued with a caution, but it was this sort of low-level crime that
led to Operation Vulcan, one of the biggest counterfeit busts in British
history, last year. It’s still moving at a rapid rate – and these sorts of
set-ups are fairly established. If you see a sign on a lamp-post saying, “Want
to earn £30 an hour?”, there’s a strong chance it involves a low-level
counterfeiting business like this, Cope says.
All the
luxury brands I approached about how they cope with counterfeits declined to
comment, passing me instead to Lewis at the ACG. “They don’t want to comment
because it could destroy trust in the original,” he says. “If they ignore it,
perhaps customers won’t be put off from buying the real thing.” Some brands, he
adds, won’t join the ACG because it acknowledges that counterfeits are a
problem: “I mean, everyone knows they are – you can see them at a market on a
Sunday.”
Back at the
Vestiaire warehouse, we check over another Hermès Birkin bag. It’s older, a
faded tomato red. Bammez points out the baggy shape and “plastic” smell. The
typography is slightly too sharp, suggesting it’s machine-stamped, and the
clasp is the wrong weight. The level of detail is extraordinary, “which makes
it harder to replicate”. It takes us five or six minutes to be sure. Bammez
thinks it’s relatively obvious from the colour, but without her eye, I would
have been tricked.
A few weeks
later, out of the blue, the scarf seller replies. She says there must be a
printing problem with the logo, and that “dry cean” means “dry clean”, so not
to wash it. Sidestepping my query about authenticity, she politely tells me
she’s “not had any other complaints” from buyers. The original listing had a
vague UK address in Yorkshire, but buried within the postage details, it turns
out the item had actually come from Hong Kong.
Once upon a
time, the Neapolitan Camorra sold knockoffs manufactured by the same factories
that made the originals. This probably still happens, says Ciara Barry of
Fashion Revolution, the global fashion activism movement. Nowadays, around 80%
of fakes come from China and Hong Kong, though recently things have been
outsourced to countries closer to the main markets in Europe. That often means
Italy and Morocco. “They have better leather and better machinery,” Bammez
says. “Some are made in the same factories as the originals, or using the same
materials or equipment, but it’s a real mix.”
At the
Vestiaire Collective warehouse in Crawley, UK, boxes marked with red “rejected”
labels contain fashion items authenticators decide are fake
The
conditions in which fast fashion is made – most notoriously, the garment
factories in Leicester where workers are trapped in conditions of modern
slavery – are well documented. But little is known about where the main
counterfeits originate from. “These factories are so underground now, it’s a
nightmare – but the set-up lends itself to the most vulnerable workers,” Barry
says.
What we can
assume, says Windham Stewart, who is an expert in supply chain labour rights,
is that workers producing counterfeit goods are more vulnerable than workers in
less illicit supply chains. “Price pressure has a significant negative impact
on workers across all fashion supply chains; one can logically assume the price
pressure for counterfeit goods is extreme … The risk of forced or child labour,
poor health and safety, and other abuses is bound to be be greater,” she says.
The same
can be said of the environmental impact, from the disposal of toxic dyes used
to colour bags to the use of animal urine to stabilise scents and even,
according to Peta, cat or dog fur instead of faux fur for the pom-poms once
popular to hang on designer bags. They also said one of the best ways to find
out if fur is fake is to burn it: “Hopefully, it would just smell of plastic.”
Vestiaire
are aware of the potential damage. When something is found to be fake, they
contact the seller. If there’s no response, they keep it for up to six months,
then aim to reuse it (they are working on ways to upcycle the materials).
According to Lewis, when the ACG are involved, brands pay for the destruction
of the counterfeit.
I tell Cope
about my scarf and wonder if he’ll try to arrest me. “In France, it is illegal
to buy a counterfeit,” he says, “but here there is no law over buying or owning
one. It would be impossible to enforce, and disproportionate. How do you
penalise someone who claims they didn’t know their football shirt was fake?”
I’m about
to leave the Crawley warehouse when I notice, at the back, several racks of
counterfeit goods with red “rejected” stamps on their labels. These have failed
the authentication and are sitting on shelves, as if waiting for absolution.
I’m reminded of Hans Brinker’s Little Dutch Boy fable, about the boy who tries
to plug a dyke with one finger – and given how rife the issue is, struck by how
futile this could all be. But their aim, I guess, is just to keep checking, one
Birkin at a time.
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