Counterfeit Couture

This is a short documentary on the "Counterfeit Crochet Project" that San Francisco artist Stephanie Syjuco started back in 2006. By Syjuco's own account, the idea for "hand-counterfeiting designer handbags (Fendi, Gucci, Chanel, Prada, etc.) . . . is to insert strange variants into the stream of commerce and consumption." Through the internet, she enlisted collaborators (or perhaps co-conspirators is a better word) to "translate" recognizable designer handbags into homespun craftworks that truly democratize fashion.

The documentary is from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts exhibition she did called "Counterfeit Crochet Project (Critique of a Political Economy)" in 2008.

(For some reason, it won't upload to the blog but click here to link to it.)

Also check out Counterfeit Chic's recent post on sartorial tricksters in France and Korea.

Sonia Sotomayor: Fashion Police?

After only Day One completed of the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings on the historic nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court Justice,* we've already heard some of the more predictable commendations and attacks about her. Committee chairman Senator Patrick Leahy, a democrat from Vermont, began the hearings with a cautionary note (Let no one demean this extraordinary woman) that ranking Republican committee members like Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) disregarded (I will not vote for --no senator should vote for -- an individual [who] allows their own personal background, gender, prejudices or sympathies to sway their decision in favor of, or against, parties before the court).

Throughout the rest of the hearings, we are also likely to hear about Sotomayor's judicial record on capital punishment, affirmative action, abortion, and her civil rights work with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, now known as LatinoJustice PRLDEF.

One bit of news about her judicial past that has been circulating in the fashion media but has not made its way into the mainstream is her work with the legal firm, Pavia & Harcourt, as a civil litigator for luxury fashion houses Fendi and Bulgari between 1984 and 1992. According to articles in WWD and Latina magazine, Sotomayor's crackdown on the knockoff industry involved stakeouts "in the back of police vans with the windows blacked out" and dicey motorcycle pursuits "around Shea Stadium in an attempt to catch some criminals selling bootleg merchandise." She also participated in rather theatrical protests like the 1986 "Fendi Crush" in which "phony Fendi bags were smashed by a garbage truck in front of Tavern on the Green as a message to those who sell and buy these fake goods." Also finally, while at Pavia & Harcourt, Sotomayor drafted key anti-counterfeiting legislation that has since become part of the New York state penal code.

* If she is confirmed (as she should be!), Sotomayor will be the first Puerto Rican, first Latina, and only third woman to serve on the High Court.

Your Fake Bag

Thank god Tatiana the Anonymous Model addressed the New York Times City Room blog post about MIT professor Dan Ariely's "findings" about counterfeit chic and moral laxity, because the responses to the study over at Fashionista were, as ever, driving me crazy. (Sample: "...when I see someone with a fake I think that they are 'fake.'") Jennifer 8. Lee writes, for the Times,

In one of his studies, half of the 250 subjects were told that the designer glasses they were wearing were "real," while the other half were told they were wearing "counterfeits." They were told to do a number of tasks that seemed to be related to the glasses, like evaluating scenery. But tucked into the sequence was a math test. Researchers found that 60 percent of those who were wearing "counterfeit" glasses cheated, while only 20 percent of those wearing "real" glasses cheated.

The Times interprets these findings to mean that counterfeit chic is the worm in the apple -- that is has, as Tatiana puts it, "a discernible corrosive effect on an individual's morality — that, in effect, wearing an item you know to be fake is like kryptonite for your sense of right and wrong." She goes on to note:

Ariely also seems to have lacked a control group. No research subjects were asked to complete the honesty-testing tasks while wearing sunglasses whose brand-status was not stated, or while wearing no sunglasses at all. Having essentially no baseline for comparison makes the results suspect; unless we know how often "average" people will cheat at mathematics or lie for low-stakes financial gain under identical conditions, there's no real way to know if people wearing branded items they believe to be counterfeit or real lie and cheat more or less often.

But most importantly, in real life people are not randomly assigned authentic or copied goods — they choose to buy them. And what motivates those choices more than wealth? The segment of the population who can actually choose to buy a real Birkin (price range lower limit: $6000, according to a Forbes article from last August that quotes a luxury goods marketeer thus: "People want to spend their money on frivolous things") is vanishingly small. The market for the $100 Chinatown version is increasingly well-stocked. How utterly insulting that a study should come along effectively to congratulate the tiny segment of the population who can afford authentic luxury items on being not only more financially successful than the rest of us, but more moral. Except I'm pretty sure Bernie Madoff's Cartier wristwatches were real.

And just for good measure, two of the comments left on the City Room blog in response to "The Moral Costs of Counterfeiting:"

The marketing processes used to turn commodities into status symbols are, from the outset, deceptive, cynical manipulations of cultural material. Associating these commodities with “realness” is highly problematic, and departing from consumer responses to branding to make general statements about honesty and authenticity is methodologically unsound. I suggest Professor Ariely enroll himself in Media Studies 100 before proceeding with his research. Moreover, this is the second article I’ve read in the Times about how unethical it is to buy counterfeit products. Both articles ignore the root causes of the social ills they describe. A better starting point from which to address the issue would be the enormous disparaties of wealth that these products are designed to publicly flaunt.

Obviously the Professor has never read “The Devil Wears Prada”.

NOTE: The "fake" Vuitton bag pictured above comes from Mind What You Wear, a "fashion guerilla" project "to bring awareness about what you wear and consume."