Commentary
The Luxury Fallacy
Visit
any popular Mediterranean resort mid-season and it won't be
long before you are offered an array of fake luxury goods -
from watches to perfumes, clothes to handbags. Depending on
the persistence of the seller, and your own personal opinion
of the counterfeit industry, your response may range from
mild interest (no sane person would ever express more than
mild interest in front of these sorts of sellers, who can
detect a sitting duck at a thousand yards) to absolute
contempt.
Western governments, the media and luxury brands tend to
have a narrower range of responses to the fake goods
industry. In fact, they really only have one - a vitriolic
condemnation that could easily lead one to believe that they
regard the Ninth Circle of Hell as a place too comfortable
for counterfeiters to spend an eternity.
So fakers are evil - end of story, then? Well no, not
exactly - and I will explain why.
More than a decade of prosperity has led to complacency
amongst luxury brands. Where once the intrinsic quality of a
luxury item was the major draw for those who were prepared
to pay the premium price, for the last twenty years
craftsmanship in high end fashion brands, at least, has been
playing a rapidly diminishing role. A close examination
of many upmarket manufacturers' pręt a porter clothing will confirm
this; poor quality materials, a level of workmanship that
would embarrass a 1970s British Leyland employee and a
general sense of paying a premium for little more than a
fancy tag are all in evidence.
Fakers cash in on the fact that luxury goods are often
reproducible at a far lower cost than that at which the
original manufacturers are selling them. Often this is not
because they use cheaper materials (although this is
sometimes the case), but is due to the fact that the
original item is so hugely overpriced that a replica - even
one that costs the same to produce - can be sold at a huge
discount and still turn a profit.
In a certain sense, then, I believe that we can view
counterfeiters as drivers of quality; the only way that
luxury goods manufacturers will ever beat them is to produce
items that are not reproducible at low costs. Or, in other
words, make luxury items that really are luxury items - not
the sorts of goods that can be knocked up with a few metres
of nylon, some general purpose zips and a small factory in
South Korea.
If you are not convinced by this line of reasoning, consider
the following: would you buy a fake Ferrari? The answer,
unless you are preternaturally stupid, or a have a
particular liking for re-bodied Toyota MR2s, is, of course,
no. The value of a Ferrari is more than merely its name; to
those of us who care, and are not merely purchasing a
supercar in order to crawl around Monaco's Casino Square on
a Saturday night, this value is the technology, the time
spent by the company honing the handling, the quality of the
engine, chassis and materials, and, lastly the aesthetics.
Luxury fashion goods often possess no more than just
aesthetics - and beauty alone is not enough to make a
mineral a gem.
So, if the luxury goods manufacturers want us to view fakes
of their products as akin to the ludicrous Lamborghini and
Ferrari copies, they need to give us items that have
intrinsic value and do not merely subscribe to the luxury
fallacy that the label is everything. I can only hope that
the current economic situation drives them, in true
Darwinian style, to this conclusion.
