An investigation conducted by the British daily "The Guardian" shows that 10% of the clothes made by important fashion companies are counterfeit.
This happens because people have become crazy about logos. The 80's were a time of intense consumption, but twenty years later, the brand names have become a religion, whose supporters would not give up famous brands like Sony, Nike or Camel for anything in the world.
Brand names have grown more important than the products themselves.
Fashion companies from Versace to Dior have made their logos so powerful that the clothes they make hardly count at present. By promoting the image before the product even comes out, companies triggered a huge demand for the brands in question. Why not? On condition that you somehow manage not to get caught wearing a fake model.
Forgers are full-fledged entrepreneurs. Forgery is just a form of flattery. When a forger takes the trouble to counterfeit the products of a specific brand, this is just an acknowledgement of the brand in question. Tommy Hilfiger's loyal customers spent nearly 2 billion dollars for the real thing last year. And obviously, the fake products sold well, too.
The British Association for Fighting Counterfeit Products (ACG) says that more than 62.000 items, leather and electronic products, illegally labelled with tags from the large Western fashion companies and destined to be sold on the British market have became aid for poor countries.
"It would have been a disaster to throw away Versace jeans, Tommy Hilfiger sweaters or Dolce e Gabana T-shirts", an ACG official says.
The parties involved eventually found a solution. The seized goods were loaded in trucks and shipped to Romania and Kosovo as aids.
You are a person who can afford to dress only in designer clothes. You buy an Armani suit, a Versace tie, a Gucci shirt and a Bulgari watch and you are certain that these companies really made those items. It happens, however, to buy a Versace suit for $200 when it actually costs $2,000.
Of course, you have heard about fake products, but if you think this is only about their quality and not about the fact that there are Versace suits made in a small mill in Malaysia, Hong Kong or Singapore.
Eight hundred kilometres away from the deluxe fashion in Milan, and five hundred kilometres away from the designer shops in Paris, there is the European counterfeit product capital. It is located neither in Poland, nor in Turkey, nor in Portugal, where most of the fakes are produced.
The European counterfeit product capital is Leicester, Great Britain. Therefore, the textile industry in England is very good at one thing. The legislation in the Great Britain allows neither the incineration nor the reselling of the confiscated goods, especially of deluxe products.
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