Fake designer goods: the lowdown

Fake designer goods aren’t all alike. There are many different levels of designer fake, each with different attributes. They include:

• Faux designer goods
• Fake designer goods
• Fake Fake designer goods
• Designer diffusion lines
• ‘Inspired by’ items

While I’m generally not a fan of fake items, knowing about them helps you to avoid being conned, and might occasionally make it possible for you to consummate your designer lust more cheaply.

Here’s more about each level of fake, and whether they’re ever worth their (greatly reduced) price tag.

Faux designer goods

Faux designer goods are so similar to the real thing that even a trained eye has to look closely to spot the differences. ‘Faux’ is used as a prefix to describe these items, e.g. faux Gucci wallet, faux Prada bag.

A faux item:

• Is made of the same material as a real item, e.g. leather not pleather
• Has high quality workmanship
• Is a direct copy of something the designer created, or has a similarly refined aesthetic
• May or may not bear the designer’s logo

You can find these items in a few different places. There are online stores that specialise in high-quality copies of designer good, especially handbags, but designers also copy one another regularly. For example, an Australian leather goods company called Oroton regularly copies the work of overseas designers. Almost every apparel manufacturer, small or large, has copied a designer item at some point, so you can find faux items all over the place.

There’s an interesting reverse snobbery around faux items. To be able to find fakes that look exactly like the real thing takes a high degree of skill, and many people who spend the money on real items have a grudging respect for people who can find a top-quality imitation.

For example, I recently bumped into an acquaintance when I was out shoe shopping. She’s a successful fashion designer with a clothing budget I can only dream about. She was trying on the most gorgeous Prada sandals, which I really hope she bought because they were fabulous on her. I commented that, if I had the money, I’d buy them in a second.

She gave me an odd look and said “but the Chloe ones you’re wearing are gorgeous”. I replied that they’re knock-offs.

Her response?

“Wow, they’re great, you can’t tell they’re fakes at all. Where did you get them?”

So, you heard it here first: you can get away with wearing faux designer items, even around top-notch fashionistas — but only if they’re really, truly identical to the real thing.

Fake designer goods

Fakes are the sort of designer knock-offs you can find very easily, and are very popular with a certain sort of tourist who’s just returned from Asia (and yes, I bought a few of these the first time I visited Thailand).

Fakes:

• Are made from cheap materials, e.g. pleather
• Are usually poorly constructed
• May take big liberties in ‘adapting’ the design
• Are emblazoned with the designer’s logo, as though it somehow makes up for the item’s other shortcomings

Those replica Louis Vuitton bags with off-centre logos are fakes: they’re obviously not real from about 15 paces away, and rarely make the wearer look chic or stylish.

You can find fakes all over the place: in certain little boutiques, at markets and all over eBay.

These items are almost always a bad deal. You can easily pay $30-50 for a low quality pleather wallet because the design resembles last year’s Dior and the logo’s stamped all over them. The materials and workmanship are worth about $5, and the item’s unlikely to last long. Beware of these items.

Fake Fake designer goods

Fake Fakes are the worst of the worst: the fake designer goods that look like a bad copy of a bad copy of the original — if they resemble anything the designer ever made at all.

Fake Fakes are like Fakes, in that they’re poor quality items that have a designer logo slapped on and a grossly inflated price, but fake Fakes also have a certain something extra: they’re really ugly.

Fake Fakes are the ones that make all those copyright infringement law suits seem completely sensible, because if someone put my name on something that ugly, I’d sue them too.

Please, please don’t buy fake Fakes. If you must buy a fake designer item, at least try to buy something attractive and somewhat faithful to the designer’s style.

There’s no excuse for those hideously ugly bags with huge Chanel linked C’s on them that I see regularly, or any other fake Fake. If you can’t afford fancy designer goods, buy something cute and simple instead.

Designer diffusion lines

I probably won’t make any friends in the fashion industry for saying this, but diffusion lines are the fakes the designer actually make money on.

Diffusion lines are the cheaper ‘authentic’ designer items, which are loosely associated with the actual designer. The designer has signed a piece of paper which gives another company the right to use the designer’s name on the company’s products, in exchange for a license fee. Sometimes, that’s literally the only involvement the designer has in the creation of these items.

To me, these are classic fakes. The designer whose name is on them didn’t design or manufacture the items, so they’re not ‘real’ designer items.

That doesn’t mean they’re all bad though — just like you can find beautiful illegal fakes, there are also some great legal fakes out there.

I’ll use Calvin Klein as an example, since I’ve owned a few pieces of their stuff. While none of the other lines designed by the masthead designer (i.e. Calvine Klein originally, or now Francisco Costa), some great stuff has been made under their name, as well as some crap.

One licensee, Warnaco, has done an interesting mix of both. About 8 years ago, I owned a pair of Calvin Klein jeans that were a great basic cut which I loved… but I’d also given up on their underwear because everything I bought fell apart almost immediately. Then they started making a particular style of bra which is now my absolute favourite… but their jeans line now sucks so much that everyone I know who wears it is a hip Baby Boomer.

I’m also really not a fan of the very average Calvin Klein Jewellery line, which is made by Swatch.

So when you see a designer name on something, even if it’s definitely licensed rather than illegally knocked off, take a careful look before you buy: the name on the label is no guarantee.

‘Inspired by’ items

The last category of fake designer goods I’d like to talk about is chain store knock-offs, which I’ll called ‘inspired by’ since that’s the euphemism store spokespeople use to describe what they’ve done.

These items:

• Are direct copies of the designer item, except they
• Bear the chain store’s label and logo instead of the designer’s
• Are made from poorer quality materials
• Use poorer workmanship

They’re easily distinguished from the real item, simply because they look like a low-quality version of the real thing. The only real difference between an ‘inspired by’ item and a straight-out Fake is that they’re sold by respectable fashion chains instead of people in markets.

If you want to know what ‘inspired by’ items are out there, take a look at fashionista.com’s Adventures in Copyright Infringement. Or check the runway pictures on style.com before you next go shopping in a chain store: most chains will have at least one designer knockoff in store most of the time.

Whether you want to buy ‘inspired by’ items or not is up to you. They’re cheap clothes that look almost, but not quite, like hot designer items. They’re fun and low-cost, but they’re also completely disposable.

Generally, they’re not my thing, but for more trendy people, they’re perfect.

So how do I know all this?

Confession: I’ve owned practically every type of replica available — the good, the bad and the very ugly. I’ve learnt my lessons about cheap ‘designer’ sunglasses bought from markets the hard way… and about fake watches, fake bags, fake t-shirts, fake shirts… When it comes to fakes, I really know what I’m talking about.

And my conclusion after buying quite a few fakes myself? They’re almost never worth the money.