Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and moreStay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Everything gets easier once you find “your person” — at least that’s what they say on the message boards. Subreddits like the euphemistically named r/RepladiesDesigner keep having their posts deleted, and people don’t share information openly: they might do so by DM, but likely they won’t share anything at all. Every so often, a picture of a beautiful bag will pop up with a celebratory message: “Just obsessed!” or “How did I do??” With supple-looking leather and painstakingly crafted labels, these are not the fake handbags you’d find set out on a white blanket by a surly young man in a tourist-trap street during your Italian vacation. Think $800 investments rather than $18 impulse buys. The hardware is the right weight, the monogram crisp enough to read from across the street. Sometimes they even come with convincing-looking “receipts”.Bags like this are hard-won, well-designed, top-dollar “superfakes”, procured through clandestine Whatsapp conversations with sellers based in China who have connections to factories specializing in “replica fashion”. And in a world where a Bottega Veneta can set you back $45,500 and the Hermes resale market is thriving to the chagrin of the company’s CEO, they’re becoming more and more appealing.This is the new era of counterfeiting, one in which the word “fake” feels almost unfair. It’s a species of replica engineered with the same obsessive precision as the originals, sometimes in the very same factories. Once, the knockoff economy ran on nylon monograms and dodgy glue; now it runs on Italian-sourced leather, hardware milled to spec, and stitch counts measured in microns. Even seasoned authenticators admit that some bags require serious dissection to expose their fraudulence.The stakes are not small. For the luxury industry, these bags represent both a multi-billion-dollar revenue leak and a threat to the very idea of exclusivity. For buyers, they offer an intoxicating loophole: status without the price tag, craftsmanship without the guilt of really buying a fake — or at least with the guilt obscured under a haze of plausible deniability. The moral terrain is slippery. Who’s working in those factories? Where did the leather come from? What seems to make buyers feel better is the fact that they’ve already lost faith in the big designers, anyway. “I just don’t want to support a company marking everything up 10+ times, and telling us it’s because it’s handcrafted in Italy only to have an article come out a few months later showing it’s actually mass produced in a factory in China,” one Redditor wrote. “Reps [sellers of superfakes] aren’t more moral. They’re doing the same thing. But they at least have the decency not to lie about it.”open image in galleryLabubu dolls — cute and creepy collectable plushies sold by the Chinese toy company Pop Mart — have had a surprising effect on those who also regularly buy luxury fashion (AFP via Getty Images)The superfakes are fed by a perfect storm: globalized manufacturing, TikTok dupe culture, erosion of trust in bigger brands, and a consumer base trained to believe in “quiet luxury” but unwilling (or unable) to spend $4,000 on a bag. They move through a network that ranges from WeChat groups to discreet ateliers in Queens, from online reseller platforms to encrypted Instagram accounts that vanish after a few sales. There is a frisson in the chase, a wink-wink shared language that makes superfakes feel less like fraud and more like insider culture. In that way, they’re exactly like how fashion has always operated. Another Redditor puts it succinctly: “We buy them because the marketing worked, but it didn’t work well enough to convince us to part with our hard-earned cash.”The irony, of course, is that luxury brands have helped build the conditions for their own imitation. As houses outsource production, ramp up margins, and trade in the sort of logo-driven scarcity that turns a handbag into a financial instrument, they create a market primed for rebellion. Some superfakes are so good that even the rebellion feels luxurious: they’re not so much knockoffs as parallel products, existing in an alternate economy where the only crime is to be caught.The call is coming from inside the houseMargarita Zimmerman is the last person you might think to be unbothered by superfakes. After retiring from her first career as an opera singer, she went to work at Louis Vuitton as director of the museum and the “showplace” atelier in Asnieres-sur-Seine where celebrities and special clients are invited to see the manufacturing process of custom trunks. To say that she knows everybody is an understatement. Pierre Cardin was a friend; she gave advice to Bernard Arnault. As an atelier, she arranged bags for countless celebrities, presidents and people in high places. By the time she retired, at the age of 76 (too early, she says — she would have preferred to stay on for another 10 years), she had also worked in the training of salespeople across France and had been the director of all the Louis Vuitton factories.One huge perk of this kind of career is the merchandise. Zimmerman, who is now 83 years old and lives in the countryside a couple of hours outside of Paris with her husband, has an extremely large collection of Louis Vuitton bags, all gifted to her during her time at the company.Five years ago, she says, “I was in a supermarket, and I had this monogrammed bag of Louis Vuitton’s… I was paying my bill, I pulled out my bag, and the salesperson at the [checkout] starts screaming: ‘Oh my God! A Louis Vuitton bag!’ She was going crazy.” Zimmerman immediately knew what to do. “I said, ‘Please give me a paper bag.’ She said, ‘Yes, madam, of course.’ So I took the bag and I put all my things in the paper bag, and I gave her my [Louis Vuitton] bag and said, ‘This is for you.’”open image in galleryBags featuring the iconic Louis Vuitton print, such as this one from the Paris S/S Louis Vuitton 2025 collection, were so widely counterfeited during the early noughties that the brand restricted its use of the print for a few years (Invision)The young woman was so overwhelmed that she started jumping up and down with tears in her eyes. Zimmerman says that there were 15 or so people in the line behind her, and they all started to laugh at her reaction. “She said: ‘But why? But why?’” Zimmerman remembers. “And I said: ‘You know why I’m doing this? I’m doing this because I want you to understand that from the minute you have this bag, absolutely nothing will change in your life. Nothing.’”She was glad to make the young woman happy that day, Zimmerman says. But she also wanted her to understand that having an exclusive purse used to mean something, and now it doesn’t. In fact, having worked for most of her life in a fashion house, she now takes a $45 bag from a high street store out with her most days. Of course, she says, the materials will never match — but the stitching is almost identical, and nobody with an untrained eye would be able to tell the difference between a good dupe and a real designer purse. Anyway, she adds, looking stylish in 2025 is about quiet luxury and understatement. Gone are the days of matching your expensive shoes to your designer handbag.“The other day — it’s a long time since I went to Paris, since I’m in the country now and I’m working from here — but I went because I had to see somebody, and I was on the street with a friend of mine and everybody was dressed like us, with trainers and jeans and a nice shirt,” she says. “…And suddenly, a lady [in designer gear, with her shoes matched to her bag] passes near us. We stop, we look at her, and we start laughing. She was like a museum! It was 20 years behind!”As Zimmerman sees it, the rise of superfakes is a symptom of a very big problem for the industry: “Luxury is over.” Once upon a time, people had custom bags made that conferred a certain social status. Then everything became much more industrial. Huge international factories became the norm, with eye-watering markups for identikit bags and items of clothing. Conspicuous wealth went out of fashion. People were no longer willing to dress to the nines to go to their office jobs, and no longer convinced that doing so would earn them a promotion or help them make connections. Meanwhile, those same consumers had become more educated on issues like climate change and welfare standards. And then, of course, there was the sudden rise of AI — and now a couple of close-up photographs of a designer bag can help an artificial intelligence agent create something that looks functionally the same.Zimmerman says she saw all of this coming. She says she spoke to a number of people in the industry about it, “and I said: What we should try to do is to simplify the collections, make it something more popular and useful for every day, because people very soon are not going to be dressed like this to go to work. It’s ridiculous, completely ridiculous.” Needless to say, her opinions were dismissed out hand — and she was, a short time later, proven right.Even decades ago, she says, designers were dismissive of their clientele. But back then, they could at least genuinely promise their customers that their products would transform their lives. Zimmerman says she knew an opera singer in Venice who was visited in her dressing room by one of the most famous fashion designers of all time. He was so moved by her performance that night that he got onto his knees and kissed the hem of her dress, saying, “You are my goddess now.” Zimmerman laughs. She says her friend thanked the man and asked him if he would design her a custom dress for her next performance, “and he said: ‘Oh no, never… because you don’t need those kind of things. This is for the people that have no style. You have style, so you don’t need a luxury dress.’” She laughs, and says it’s important to think about who uses the word ‘luxury’ and why, from a historical perspective: “A king never says, ‘I have a luxury crown.’”From trade secrets to the LabubuVeronica Manlow has spent a lot of time interviewing people who work in the fashion industry, from the factory workers who construct tiny parts of Hermes bags, to the people who spend years saving up to buy one. As a professor of fashion marketing, an academic researcher in the dynamics underpinning luxury selling, and co-author of Crafting Luxury: Craftsmanship, Manufacture, Technology and the Retail Environment, she’s seen behind the curtain of the luxury fashion industry.When Manlow was speaking with Louis Vuitton factory workers in Alvarado, Texas, “one woman who worked there told me that people who work there are always approached by Chinese people who have manufacturing entities who want them to give their knowledge so they can replicate things,” she says. “Trade secrets, basically.” Even if the workers wanted to sell their knowledge, however, it wouldn’t be much use: one way Louis Vuitton, like many other brands, protects itself is by only manufacturing small parts of each bag in separate factories. It’s possible that a very dedicated operation could gather that information from each place. But it would be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor.open image in galleryLabubu dolls — cute and creepy collectable plushies sold by the Chinese toy company Pop Mart — have had a surprising effect on those who also regularly buy luxury fashion (AFP/Getty)That’s a Band-Aid solution rather than a foolproof one, just like microchipping and blockchain authentication — both flirted with by big brands, but increasingly disappearing — because most of them now realize that superfakes are here to stay. A lot of the salespeople, rather than fight it, have decided to simply adapt to this brave new world.“Some brands have said — maybe not publicly, but I’ve heard that they’ve said: Look, if somebody buys [a superfake], they may become a customer later,” says Manlow. “So that is another thing, that somebody might buy something today and then later on, they’re successful in life. Years later, they may actually say: ‘OK, I really want to get the real Chanel bag.’ So think of it as a stepping-stone.”And then there’s the people who unwittingly bought the superfakes, through a website that looked legitimate or claimed to be an official reseller. These sites usually tempt customers in with promises like skipping a waitlist for a new bag or customizing a product. They’ll pay thousands of dollars for a Birkin bag or an Hermes bracelet that looks functionally identical to the branded product, and then one day they’ll walk into the brand’s store for some upkeep or a small repair only to discover they’ve been wearing a fake. One of the salespeople for a big brand told Manlow that this kind of situation is increasingly common — and “it’s been a boon for him… He said: I always use it as a bridge. He said he’s had so much success with that because people feel humiliated. They come in and they think that they’re going to get something repaired, and then they realize that they’ve been duped. Sometimes they cry.” He’s perfected his strategy on how to handle the situation. “He’s able to say to them: Look, it can happen to anyone. It’s not your fault. I can’t even tell… and he can gain that person’s trust and say: You don’t ever have to worry about this happening again.” A loyal customer base is directed straight back to him, out of the hands of illegal resellers who hooked people in who otherwise might’ve been on the fence about buying luxury. Lawyer and founder of the Fashion Law Institute, Professor Susan Scafidi, has also noticed that it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate the fakes from the real products over the past couple years; even, she adds, over the past couple months. Likely, the rise of AI has to do with it. “I can’t tell you which brand, but I had a brand president tell me that they received a bag about which there was a question, and it took their team two days to determine that it was a fake,” she says.open image in galleryDonald Trump holds a Louis Vuitton purse during a workshop tour in 2019. It’s getting harder and harder to differentiate the fakes from the real products over the past couple years (REUTERS)As the counterfeits get more sophisticated, other companies are appearing to try and stop the flow. There’s a company Scafidi knows that takes ultra-high-definition photographs of each small part of a luxury brand in an effort to help legitimate resellers with authentication. That sounds like a good strategy — until you imagine those photographs falling into the wrong hands.What both Scafidi and Manlow agree about is that the so-called “gray market” — when factory workers would work an extra hour on their shift, create functionally identical bags as they’d made all day on the official line, and then sell them out the back door — is very rare these days. Factories are under stricter controls and workers are much more likely to operate clandestinely, through word-of-mouth Whatsapp and Signal groups and in factories entirely dedicated to superfakes. Instead, as Manlow found, factory workers are finding themselves approached either physically or digitally by middlemen eager to buy their manufacturing knowledge. Scafidi is clear that from a legal perspective, “that’s straight-up corporate espionage.”But then there are the consumers who don’t care if their bag looks a little different to the established product. In fact, they wear it as a badge of pride. Manlow says she’s heard of parties being held in expensive Long Island enclaves where superfakes are the central event. Moneyed residents come from the surrounding towns, or up from the city, to get their hands on bags that still look nice, but don’t come with such a stigma of unexamined privilege. These people, Manlow adds, are often liberal-minded and concerned about issues like climate change and geopolitical instability. They want their neighbors to know they spent $1,000 on a nice-looking fake bag — but not $10,000 on the real deal.Manlow spoke to one woman who said she spends about $35,000 a year on luxury fashion items alone, “but she hadn’t been carrying her Hermes bag lately because she’s mostly wearing yoga clothes during the day and she’s much more casual.” She told Manlow that, considering the dominant style is much more laidback in New York, she felt “embarrassed” to be seen carrying around a bag that fancy, “and then she said to me that she’s buying brands that are less conspicuous. She’s still spending, but she’s not spending on the obvious, big brands.”However, a few weeks later, the same woman found her way back to her collection of high-end purses, through the unexpected route of the Labubu. The troll-like furry creatures started out as fun keyring accessories and quickly became an online obsession, after the brand began limiting the number of Labubus available. Even though they remain very affordable — retailing at about $35 each — the little toys caught the attention of people more accustomed to buying high-end luxury, perhaps because of the similar way in which they operate: through scarcity, hype, and in-group mentality. Manlow was taken aback when she first saw someone carrying a Labubu attached to a Coach bag in Union Square. But then she caught up with the woman who’d been embarrassed to carry her designer bags. It turned out she now had a full-blown Labubu obsession.“She totally became obsessed with getting one,” says Manlow, laughing. “And she’s now like: ‘It’s so much fun. I love going out with my Birkin bag, and I have these two Labubus and I have them hanging, and I interchange them.” On a trip to Dubai, where Labubus hadn’t yet fully caught on, she was able to snap up a couple of hard-to-get trolls that had eluded her in New York for the rest of her luxury purse collection. The dopamine rush of the victory and the story that came with it transformed the woman’s feeling about her luxury items. They had become, Manlow says, “fun again”.Does your superfake share a supply chain with terrorists?The Labubu effect seems to underline how big brands are losing their customers. The market for personal luxury goods has slowed significantly over the past year, with 50 million consumers having already abandoned brands like Dior, Gucci and Burberry. A combination of constantly rising prices, a decline in perceived quality, and a lack of exclusivity and customizability is said to be to blame. The only brand to buck the trend was Hermes, whose growth remains extremely strong. Some analysts have pointed to the iconic Birkin bag — which still must be acquired through a waitlist, and remains handcrafted while others shift more and more toward industrial means of production — as the main underlying reason. Others believe that it’s the fact Hermes doesn’t rely as heavily on China — whose economy is experiencing a downturn and therefore is experiencing much less consumer spending — as other big brands. An Hermes spokesperson has said that the company itself can’t entirely explain it.open image in galleryThe original Birkin bag, a prototype for the wildly successful Hermes creation, sold for $10 million at auction earlier this year (AP)Margarita Zimmerman, the retired opera singer who worked at Louis Vuitton for decades, is sure that brands have already lost the war for people’s attention. Expensive clothes and accessories used to convey a sense of having your finger on the pulse, she says, whereas now having your finger on the pulse means being aware of pressing socioeconomic and environmental issues. A hand-sewn purse used to come with a story attached, and now it simply comes with a list of factories where its various components were made. A recent labor scandal in Italy also seemed to confirm what many consumers believe: that high-end brands don’t have a perfect humanitarian record when it comes to their factories, either — far from it. Since early 2024, five high-end luxury brands — including LVMH, Dior and Armani — have been ordered to undergo monitoring by the Italian courts due to evidence of worker abuses in their supply chain.Is it really so different to commission a superfake, then? Susan Scafidi is aware a lot of consumers now think that way. But, she says, it’s important to consider how sophisticated an operation superfaking is, and who it relies upon. “If you’re going to be moving large containers the size of a small New York apartment across international borders, you’re going to need some help in doing so,” she says. “So we’re dealing with payoffs, we’re dealing with organized crime, we’re dealing with other things, and the profits, therefore, are relatively unsavory.” People who make money from the large-scale superfake industry are almost inevitably also tied to “selling drugs or guns or people,” she adds. “I remember when I first was being told that some of the money from counterfeiting also supported terrorism. And I thought: OK, now maybe we’ve gone a step too far — where’s the proof? And I of course don’t have a security clearance, but there has indeed been at least some proof shared publicly that some of the money has gone to fund terrorism.” In that way, the supply chain for a superfake is very similar to the supply chain for cocaine or fentanyl.It’s not illegal to purchase a superfake as a consumer in the US, simply because the law “can’t prove what a consumer is thinking,” says Scafidi. Legal avenues are still pursued against superfakes, but they’ll have little effect until they can get right up to the top of the supply chain. For the brands themselves, the “greater issue,” she adds, “is market dilution. Why would I spend a lot of money on the real thing when I’m going to see fakes walking up and down the street and up and down the subway cars and in every restaurant I walk into and everywhere else? In other words, it reduces the distinctiveness of the real thing. It reduces the desirability, it reduces that sense of scarcity and, and thus the value in the real thing.”Indeed, the superfake reflects the luxury industry’s own contradictions, the consumer’s own ambivalence, and the global system that allows both to flourish. Each bag is a test case in what we’re really paying for: the workmanship, the brand name, the status, the fantasy. Strip away the logo and the provenance, and the physical difference between a $6,000 tote and a $600 copy can be imperceptible. What’s left is the story — a story of heritage, scarcity, and the idea that certain objects are worth protecting from duplication. As the technology improves and the distribution networks get slicker, the line between real and fake blurs further. But the most unsettling thing about the rise of superfakes is that they force us to confront how fragile the idea of luxury really is. In a world where the copy can be perfect, the only thing separating the counterfeit from the genuine article is what the consumer chooses to believe. And how do you continue to sell that vision when it’s clear that the entire belief system surrounding it is breaking down?
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‘Luxury is over’: The superfake changed fashion. How can big brands fix the mess they helped make?
