With fashion lovers increasingly turning to secondhand luxury, bogus goods are rife. But at what cost?
The rainbow-checked scarf arrives on time, by post, in a Ziploc bag. The tag reads Acne Studios, a high-end Swedish label, but the wording looks … off. I send a photo to a typographer friend. “It’s pretty obvious it’s fake,” she says. “Look at the e and s – they’re different fonts.” Inside, the washing label advises “dry cean only”. I squeeze it. It feels genuine – not unlike the £250 bouncy wool and mohair real thing. But it’s not. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for the £22 I spent. I email the seller and point out the discrepancies. There’s no reply.
This was not my first fake. In my 20s, I went to Vietnam and returned with a “Chanel” 2.55 handbag and two “Kipling” holdalls bought from Ho Chi Minh City’s Ben Thanh market, famous for its rich pho soup and cheap knockoffs. Before that, aged 18, it was “Ralph Lauren” shirts with skewwhiff jockey logos from Bangkok’s MBK Center. To me they were all obvious fakes. With the scarf, I thought I’d bagged a bargain. I had been fooled.
