Last November, Hong Kong customs seized a container of counterfeit Louis Vuitton leather products shipped from South Korea. Lawrence Wong, customs chief, valued the shipment of handbags, travel bags, purses and wallets, at $38,461. He said that if they`d been genuine, they would have retailed for about $3,850,000.
Big difference. It`s one reason there`ll always be a market for fake status: It costs so much less than the real thing.
Wearing a fake Rolex or a fake Polo sweatshirt sends a message of its own: that you know what`s hot-and you have more sense than to pay for it.
There`s even some poetic justice in the way phony status symbols subvert a value system that`s phony to begin with. What`s a Rolex watch or a Vuitton bag but an attempt to trick you into respecting somebody on inadmissible grounds?
This is why it`s hard to work up a lot of moral outrage over counterfeit status trademarks, unless you own one of the trademarks being counterfeited.
It`s not as if most people who buy $25 fake Rolexes would buy $1,000 real ones if there were no fakes on the market. People who buy quasi-Rolexes know they`re not getting the real thing. According to Brian Brokate, a lawyer for Rolex, they`re still being ”ripped off; paying $25 to $30 for a $3 item that will break in a few days.”
Of course, it may not break. Besides, if you bought a real Rolex, you`d be paying anywhere from $1,000 to $50,000 for a watch that won`t tell time any better than a $30 Swatch-not everybody`s idea of a better deal.
But that`s not the point. Brokate explains that the Rolex name and the Rolex crown, registered trademarks of Rolex U.S.A., are ”like property. They represent years of engineering and a lot of money invested in advertising. They`re associated with quality merchandise”-and using them without authorization is stealing.
There`s one more thing to take into account before you decide to invest in some fake status. That`s the people who fake it in the first place. Some may be perfectly nice Third World businessmen. But as with trade in any other illegal commodity, there`s a sleaze factor.
Consider the upstate Pennsylvania operation that produced 14,000 dozen fake Izod Lacoste polo shirts several years ago. Cosmo ”Gus” Aiello, reputed to be an organized crime figure and suspected contract killer, pled guilty in that case-and a few days later was gunned down coming out of a Howard Johnson`s in Clifton, N.J.
Who wants to wear a fake status symbol with blood on its hands?
