It’s a swamp outside, but in here it’s Autumn/Winter 2017: brightly lit, well-climatised, vaguely perfumed. A speaker on a white desk hums. A shop girl wearing a breathing mask squints a smile. I stroke an iridescent nylon parka, a burgundy knit turtleneck, a razor-sharp satin mule. I lose track of time, exchange rates, exactly how I came to be here, fingering the tag of a powder-pink coat…

Chloé, the tag reads, and the glossy bump of the accent aigu is convincing. But then a suitcase bangs down a flight of stairs, and I remember where I am.

‘I designed it,’ Ms. Fen says. ‘But they’ll buy it if the tag says Chloé. The cut, the fabric, was my idea.’ The coat is made of silk the texture of butterfly wings. It costs 750 yuan, about $110.

Ms. Fen, a wholesaler, has glossy black hair and nails. She is twenty-eight years old. When we meet, she pulls up in a white Aston Martin, pristine except for a crack on the right rearview mirror. She is wearing an assortment of beautiful clothes: distressed jeans, a négligée tank, a forest-green Chanel bag. She’s aware of what this all conveys. ‘People see me and feel envy. But they don’t know what I went through to get here.’

I, magazine writer and emissary of New York City’s fashion industry, show up in a T-shirt and cargo pants, accessorised with a ripped plastic bag. But it doesn’t end up mattering, because Ms. Fen and I speak a common language. ‘Yeah, yeah yeah yeah! Like, Gucci before was half dead,’ she says, rapping her nails impatiently against a rack. My translator hears the word as Fucci, but I know what Ms. Fen meant.

‘So they hired all these stars to make them known in the Chinese market, but it’s people like me who give them brand awareness,’ she continues. ‘We adjust the clothes and make them more consumer friendly. The public is more powerful than the stars. My business is helping your business.’ She rolls her eyes, as if this is obvious to everyone.

Ms. Fen is a pseudonym. She sees counterfeiting as an underappreciated art, but knows that to China’s government it’s a crime, no matter how creatively it’s pulled off. The brands who lobby for anti-counterfeiting laws and fund raids on shops like hers agree. Their narrative goes like this: made of inferior materials, sold in second-rate stores, fakes smother cultural ingenuity with swaths of Prado polyester. Which, if you ask Ms. Fen’s opinion, isn’t exactly fair. Take this sweater. Unlike the Chloé coat, it is based on an actual Alexander Wang design. ‘The wool was scratchy,’ Ms. Fen says. ‘So I developed my own knit and added more cotton to the fabric. In the end, mine is nicer to wear.’

Hers is one of several thousand stores in the South Oil Wholesale Market Complex in Nanshan District, Shenzhen, China. If the inside of her building is like a basement Bergdorfs, all corners and cashmere and hidden escalators and fur, the outside is like the nearby factories from where the clothes came: spartan, indistinct. Not all vendors in the market sell fakes. Guangdong, the province which encompasses Shenzhen, is the biggest garment-producing region in the biggest garment-producing country, exporting to nearly every other place in the world.¹ Copies are only a fraction of its output, although how big a fraction depends on how you define a copy. Ms. Fen takes us through the maze. We pass kid-size replicas of designer streetwear. We pass a fake Gucci based on real Gucci based on fake Gucci (more on that later). We pass piles of identical logoless sweaters, onto which the tags of dozens of brands with no relationship to one another will one day be sewn. Outside, we pass a Starbucks franchise. Another.

‘All brands steal from each other,’ Ms. Fen says, rapping on the wheel. ‘We’re only one part of the food chain.’

I’m in Guangdong because it seems like a place where the chain’s links converge. In a year, the province exports 2.21 billion pairs of shoes. It produces 6.635 billion pieces of clothing.² Within global fashion’s inscrutable supply chains and recursive inspiration boards and references that ricochet across space and time, most trends pass through here momentarily, on their way somewhere else.

Shenzhen, in its current incarnation, is not quite forty years old; the city was, in 1980, modern China’s first Special Economic Zone, through which the country opened to global capitalism. Guangzhou, 120 kilometres away, was a trade hub of another era, of three-masted ships and porcelain vegetable tureens destined for Massachusetts and the Netherlands, onto which anonymous artists painted the city’s white portico merchant buildings.³ Two hundred years later, I visit a wholesale district still teeming with export ephemera. I’m not here to shop, although resisting is difficult.

It’s not just that there are beautiful things. There are also ugly things, soft things, prickly things, shiny things. There is basically every kind of thing, right at your fingertips, and it’s probably cheap, but you have to hunt it down. At New China Plaza, a fashion wholesale market in a twenty-story glass tower, I find a thing that I want very much, in a stall demarcated only by an alphanumeric code. It smells of chemicals and is wrapped in a cocoon of packing tape, and when I unearth it, I must act quickly (and take a minimum of five), because tomorrow, a new bundle of things will arrive from a factory on the back of a sweating teenager, and that thing that could have altered the course of my life – you never know! – will be gone.

My translator doesn’t really get why I want this thing. It is a T-shirt advertising a Harley Davidson store in Yonkers, NY, ‘Designed by Korea,’ according to its tag. There is a picture on it too, of an androgynous skateboarding youth. Seoul is 2,069 kilometres away. Yonkers is 12,845 kilometres away. The text is perfectly replicated, down to the street address, except for one digit in the phone number, which is actually a letter. The vendor, whose factory produced the shirt, wonders if I’ve ever been to Yonkers. No, I tell her, and pay.

A Chanel store is a few kilometres away, in a luxury mall. In it, you can breathe perfumed air and try on ballet flats. In different mall nearby, there is a concept store, where you can buy a copy of Vestoj. There are two Zaras within a taxi’s distance, where you can dig through the racks and, once in a while, unearth something sublime. That, too, is a kind of hunt, although I prefer the one in the tower.

A European fast-fashion brand with annual sales in the billions of dollars has factories near Guangzhou, and I interview someone who works for one of its suppliers. The employee asks me not to use her nor her company’s name. She believes that the company would not want the following practice public, even though she argues it is widespread. ‘The hardest and most expensive part about designing a shoe is to develop its mold. But if you have the shape already, you can do it easily.’ When this company wants to replicate a Balenciaga shoe, it will create a mold using the shape not of an original from the Balenciaga store, but of a fake from someone like Ms. Fen. ‘Guangzhou is the best place for fakes,’ she says. ‘And they have contacts of the people doing the best ones, so they just call them up. There’s no need to go to Balenciaga.’ So it’s a copy of a copy? ‘Yes,’ she says.

In China, trademark law protects registered logos and brand names, like the word ‘Balenciaga.’ The shape or colour or texture of a design is difficult to patent. To do so, the design must be totally novel, never before seen in the consumer market in China or abroad.⁴ And what design is ever totally novel? At a factory in Foshan, a city just west of Guangzhou, Fu Shi Cai, a manufacturer for menswear brands in Russia, Denmark, and Germany, describes the process of adopting other brands’ shoe design as a kind of translation. ‘All footwear trends come from Italy,’ he says. ‘But no two country’s feet are alike.’ Fu’s company, Kaitai Shoes, buys samples in Italy and France, from Ferragamo and Yamamoto, then takes them back to China to study them. They perform chemical tests and examine the materials, then make their own permutations, tailored to clients’ preferences. ‘European feet are longer, with a narrower instep,’ he points out. ‘Germans prefer conservative colours. Russians feet have a thick instep, but shorter feet.’

We walk through his florescent-lit factory floor. A hundred workers, mostly middle-aged women, sit at tables, working on sewing machines. They are wearing blue aprons, and a few of them have high heels, I notice.

‘Where do trends come from before they come from Italy?’ I ask Fu.

He thinks for a moment. ‘A great man, a star.’

‘Where does the star get it from?’

‘He gets it from the trend,’ Fu says. ‘It’s like a full circle.’

(Later, my translator tells me that the circle simile was actually hers, not Fu’s. Translation is a kind of imperfect copying, she says. ‘It’s like I’m having two conversations at once.’)

In Shenzhen, I have lunch with Ms. Fen, at a restaurant she’s opened the night before. We eat spicy crayfish, a dish from her hometown in Northeast China. The restaurant is a hobby, she says; wholesaling is her main business. Soon, she wants to start an original brand, using money from counterfeits to fund it. ‘I pay attention to good designs, I know I could come up with them.’

Ms. Fen’s parents were construction workers. They recently retired, and she now supports them financially. When Ms. Fen first came to Shenzhen, she had no job and no savings. But she had always been good at shopping, and she had an instinct she could start a business. ‘I studied fashion design in school, and then I worked in a store in a market in Zhejiang,’ a province near Shanghai. Most of the clothes at that market were from Shenzhen, she noticed. When she arrived in Shenzhen, she took pictures of the clothes at the markets, and sent them to her contacts in Zhejiang. ‘They’d say I want this piece for two hundred, and I’d order it.’

Ms. Fen now has twenty employees and three stores. Her goods are produced in collaboration with four to five workshops, mostly around Shenzhen. They are a reflection of her taste. ‘I’ll go to Paris for ten days, and spend eight visiting big brands’ stores. And so I have a very clear concept of their characteristic. For instance, this is very Miu Miu.’ Ms. Fen points at my translator’s dress. ‘When I’m in China, I visit the fabric markets, and I know from memory that this is really good for a certain brand.’ She also buys pieces in the stores to wear herself – which, maybe later, she’ll decide to copy. On a recent trip to Hong Kong, she went shopping at Balenciaga; on a trip to Paris, she bought a Burberry mini skirt, the replica of which now hangs in her store. ‘The price of the original is fair,’ she says. ‘Those stores have a lot of outlets, and they spend money on fashion weeks. I can accept that a piece of clothing costs $1,500. But not everyone can afford it.’ Ms. Fen’s clients are in China and Korea and Indonesia, some of them retail stores, some of them wholesalers. They know that Ms. Fen’s clothes aren’t real. ‘But they want good designs, too.’

In a busy month, Ms. Fen’s stores sell about 12,000 pieces, priced between 200 and 1000 yuan, or $30 and 150. This means in a busy month revenues approach $1 million. Globally, no one knows exactly how much counterfeiting grosses, although trade groups estimate the value of the annual trade at around half a trillion dollars.⁵ They also spend undisclosed millions to fight it. For years in China, a primary means to combat counterfeiting in fashion was by initiating raids against trademark infringers, says Alexandre Gapihan, now an attorney, who worked between 2008 and 2012 as a client manager for China-based intellectual property law firms, with clients comparable to Coach and Louis Vuitton. But the raids on factories and markets like the one where Ms. Fen works were never cost effective. ‘You might walk away with a hundred bags, and you just paid $10,000 for the policemen,’ he says. ‘Sellers are very nimble, and companies became disillusioned.’ Lately, he says, more brands are turning to artificial intelligence to monitor listings on online wholesale sites for fakes.

Ms. Fen has concerns about the illegal nature of her business. But because she copies what she considers niche brands – Acne Studios and Chloé and Alexander Wang, instead of Gucci and Louis Vuitton – she doesn’t see herself as a target, compared to some of the other vendors in her market. ‘But absolutely, worst case scenario would be that the whole market gets shut down,’ she says. ‘That’s why I want to open a company doing original designs. I want to transform my business model.’ Originality is this counterfeiter’s dream. The style of the clothes would continue to be her taste: ‘Casual, not so feminine, and low key, not with logos on everything.’ But the volumes would be lower, and the price higher. Ms. Fen is currently renovating an office in which she intends to host her new company and hire designers. But she fears original clothing will never be as profitable as counterfeits. Sometimes, Ms. Fen feels very tired. While she’s falling asleep each night around 2 am, thoughts about samples, promotions, and teaching her sales staff how to merchandise styles crowd her mind. The reality of the fashion business is this: ‘Consumers believe in brands,’ she says, glumly.

One morning in Guangzhou, I meet a woman who goes by the nickname Vivi, and who embodies faith in brands. She wears tiny slivers of tape over her eyelids to create a crease, and clutches three iPhones with manicured fingers. Vivi is twenty-six, and an internet celebrity on Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce platform. Her company of twenty employees makes and sells clothes inspired by Chanel’s and Dior’s, some 10,000 units for a hit product. They are not counterfeits, but ‘the feeling that you get when you first see them, is that this is very Chanel,’ she explains. Vivi is her company’s owner as well as its model, and she can afford real Chanel. Sometimes she drives her Mercedes SUV to the luxury mall in town, trying on clothes to buy or to use as reference samples. ‘I might change a button, or I might only keep a button.’

Vivi gets most of her ideas not at Chanel, but at New China Plaza, the twenty-story tower of fashion Babel, in Guangzhou. One day, we visit, and she orders dresses, five units of each size, at $15 a piece, from a stall. Amid the rip of packing tape, the mountains of factory deliveries, the lingering odour of plastic, the dresses give off no strong feeling. Online, where she’ll sell them for $22, they become more than thread and seams. Vivi pairs them with real Chanel handbags and bashful smiles, café lunches and strolls on vaguely foreign streetscapes. In some photos, she’s in a Seattle coffee shop, in others, a Seoul pizza restaurant or a Parisian hôtel particulier. I realise eventually that these streetscapes are sets, and start to notice other details. The grass is a glaring green, the sky more crystalline than the one outside.

Brands mask how clothes are made. ‘That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,’ wrote the philosopher Walter Benjamin, about the impact of photography on twentieth century visual culture. He could have been writing about clothing. For Benjamin, an aura was a kind of patina – a dressmaker’s fingerprints, the texture of handspun wool – that situated an object within space and time. Mass-produced fashion bears no trace of its birth or of its life cycle, of the manufacturers and markets and container ships through which it passes on the way to acquiring meaning. It does so through a brand. Brands are auras of our age, stitching together discrete objects into abstractions of coolness, nostalgia, elegance. This is as true for Chanel as for its Taobao imitators. Its fashion is sewn in ateliers, its salesmen versed on the provenance of textiles, but what authenticates an object as Chanel is something less concrete. It’s our idea of Chanel, of orchestras and dancing models and Tilda Swinton air kisses, Saudi princesses and ostrich feathers and jacquard wallpaper. In the stores, there are no orchestras – or ateliers – but there are racks, on which a dress might retail for $4,000, for no reason other than that the people who can afford to believe the fiction, do.

The construct can be deliberately deconstructed, for a result that’s ultimately the same. In New York, an Instagram account that posts runway images next to look-a-likes from the past is on everyone’s lips. ‘Ppl knocking each other off lol,’ its bio reads. Gucci hires the account to unpack the references in its latest collection. The brand collaborates with a graffiti artist, who had spent years riffing on its logo without permission. It hires Dapper Dan, the 1980s Harlem counterfeiter widely respected for his artistic ability, after controversy ensues when the company references his designs without credit. It makes a bag that misspells its own name as ‘GUCCY.’

One day at New China Plaza, I spot what appears to be a copy of a copy of a copy: a Gucci sweater for $15, whose spray-paint logos were the result of Gucci’s own collaboration with an appropriation artist. I talk to my translator about it at length; we use words like appropriation, recursive, mimesis.

The young woman vendor is uninterested. She doesn’t know the story of the sweater she’s selling, but it doesn’t matter. ‘It sells well,’ she says.

Raquel Sanchez Montes, an expat stylist in Guangzhou, is titillated by the phenomenon of misspellings on fake goods, and has been making work about it longer than Gucci. In a recent photo shoot of hers, two models sport T-shirts she found in local markets: Empdridarmani, Andersson Wang and Mscohino.

There’s a difference between these shirts and an imitation Céline bag, she explains. ‘They’re funny fakes! They’re creative. It’s not someone who wears something you know they can’t afford, pretending to be something they’re not.’

I realise this is a line of thinking I’ve followed, too, in choosing, when asked about my own real-seeming fakes, to boast unabashedly about their provenance. Self-awareness creates distance between us and what we’re wearing. It makes us feel smarter than our clothing, because we are able to rewrite its significance. Which is ultimately fine – but not really different from wearing a fake bag to seem richer. Or a real bag, to seem generous. Or one set of glasses to appear discreet, and another one to look feral. Or a white T-shirt in which you hope to confront the world as a blank slate, even when you know such neutrality will never be possible.

It’s all pretending, whether or not the clothes are fake.

The reporting for this article was made possible with the generous support of Tasha Liu and Labelhood Shanghai.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor.

DISNOVATION.ORG is a working group based in Paris, at the crossroads of contemporary art, research and hacking. It is composed of artist Nicolas Maigret, graphic designer Maria Roszkowska, artist and researcher Clément Renaud and designer Hongyuan Qu.

This article was originally published in Vestoj: On Authenticity, available for purchase here.

1. China exported $175 billion in clothing in 2015, according to the World Trade Organization; the next biggest exporter was the E.U. at $112 billion. In 2016, Guangdong accounted for 21.1% of China’s garment production. See: www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/
   wts2016_e/wts2016_e.pdf and news.efu.com.cn/newsview-1219680-1.html ↩

2. See: www.haiguan.info/newsinfor/ macroscopicaanalysedetail.aspx?id=1289 and www.gdstats.gov.cn/tjsj/gy/zycpcl/201702/ ↩

3. P.C. Perdue, Rise and Fall of the Canton Trade System, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Visualizing Cultures, © 2009. ↩

4. The registration process, meanwhile, can take over a year. See: Chinese Intellectual Property and Technology Laws, ed. R Kariyawasam, p. 25 – 40; 46 ↩

5. ‘Trade in Counterfeit and Pirated Goods: Mapping the Economic Impact,’ Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, April, 2016. www.oecd.org/industry/global-trade-infake-goods-worth-nearly-halfa-trillion-dollars-a-year.htm ↩

ONE OF THE FATHERS of modern psychology, the Austrian physician-turned-psychoanalyst Alfred W. Adler (1870–1937) was an influential figure in his nascent field; amongst many significant contributions, he developed theories around inferiority and superiority (often popularly misnamed ‘complexes’), exploring the ways in which individuals might compensate emotionally and psychologically for perceived physical deficits. Socialist in his political orientation, Adler rejected his peer Sigmund Freud’s emphasis on the central importance of his patients’ childhoods and libidos in favour of an holistic understanding of the interconnectedness between individuals and society, as well as the reciprocal ethical and moral obligations between them – what he termed ‘the social imbeddedness of the individual.’¹

One of his most persuasive and compelling investigations was around the power of fiction to influence fact, a dynamic articulated in his theory of ‘acting as if.’ Influenced by German philosopher Hans Vaihinger’s book The Philosophy of As If (1911), Adler explored the power of exercising mental fictions, a precursor to the later emergence of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.² A constructivist psychological approach, the Adlerian technique of ‘acting as if’ encourages the patient to act out desirable behaviour – for example, empathetic responses, or assertive decision-making – on a daily basis. By acting and thus feeling differently, and through receiving recalibrated responses from others to this externalised set of behaviours, the patient eventually actualises as a different person – the person imagined through the ‘final fictional goal.’ In Adler’s construct, acting as if is a necessary mindset to inhabit for social cohesion and the greater good of societies built through healthy, empathetic, goal-oriented individuals.

***

In 1879, when English gentleman’s outfitter Thomas Burberry trademarked his weatherproofed gabardine (the foundation for his eponymous clothing company founded two decades earlier), he was inspired by the lanolin-coated cotton worn by weathered shepherds on the Hampshire hills. During World War I, men of the officer class purchased Burberry trench coats (alongside those made by Aquascutum and others) that were carefully fitted by the sort of tailors with whom members of their social standing were already well acquainted; officers were historically sourced from the upper classes. And, as the war took its horrible, fatal toll on a generation comprised of all types of men sent to the front, the officer class was eventually necessarily replenished by new recruits from lower social classes. Their contingent status was reinforced by the stinging moniker bestowed on them by their established peers: ‘temporary gentlemen.’ The uniform, including the carefully tailored trench coat, became less precise in meaning, no longer a clear signifier of lineage, even if it did still denote military rank.³

In the immediate postwar years of frugality, rationing and reification of war heroes, trench coats found their way into civilian fashions, undergoing further metamorphoses as they – and, from the 1920s, their boldly recognisable checked lining and detailing – became syncretic canvases for country life, English tradition, outdoor pursuits and arriviste aspirations. By the early twenty-first century, when British soap actress Danniella Westbrook paired her infamous cocaine habit with head-to-toe Burberry check (going so far as to cover her infant daughter and pram in it, too, to the delight of sneering tabloid editors), the original significance of the garment and its spin-off items had morphed from genuine indicator of the elevated classes and the quality of its English manufacture to their complete erasure. Of course, this was not due to a significant change in the garment’s materiality, but rather down to repeated and varied performances – acting as if – that had decentred its codes and exposed its – and, more broadly, fashion’s – contingent authenticity.

This spiral into the realm of the ersatz was furthered by the proliferation of counterfeit copies that enshrined Burberry check – in particular, affordable accessories like the cap – as the sartorial preference of the ASBO⁴ generation of chavs, neds and scallies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Westbrook could afford (or had been dressed in) the ‘real deal,’ and thus her instrumentalisation of the Burberry label and its aesthetic was an attempt to counterfeit class and social standing – an electrifying transgression in hierarchy-obsessed British culture. The streetcorner co-option, on the other hand, set the stage for a much more instructive – and arguably more interesting – echo chamber around authenticity moving from low-to-high that continues to play out today.

In the early 2000s, at the tender age of thirty, Christopher Bailey was installed as design director at Burberry just as the counterfeit mania had reached its peak. Bailey eventually (and wildly successfully) recalibrated public perception of the brand by reining in its use of the check, introducing impressive runway shows and the limited edition Prorsum line and mining the brand’s history to create heritage items. In October 2017, when he announced he would exit the company he had helmed for over fifteen years, Bailey had made shareholders and consumers content by restoring a comforting vision of the trench coat as a luxury item. Yet, in the words of anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, whose work interrogates notions of hegemony, such a pathway from authenticity to mass proliferation – and back, as Burberry has tracked – does not shore up infallible institutions; such journeys challenge ‘the conceit at the core of the culture of Western capitalism: that its signifiers can be fixed, that its editions can be limited, that it can franchise the platonic essence of its mass-produced modernity.’⁵ It is this play on signification, its power as performance and the ensuing ability to provoke such strong and simultaneous reactions of desire and discomfort that makes fashion so centrally important to cultural discourse and such a radical form of design. Bailey understood this as much. And so, as a parting shot – perhaps secure in his achievements, and with a knowing nod to the period of panic over counterfeits in which he was hired – he collaborated with Muscovite provocateur Gosha Rubchinskiy on an eight-piece collection that dripped Burberry check over bucket hats and trench coats, resurrecting the spectre of the football hooligan in the form of the currently uber-fetishised post-Soviet gopnik. As Bailey relinquished his post directing the Burberry troops, his final word on the brand’s heritage was recognition of the peculiar, contingent tension between confidently inhabiting status and acting as if.

It is an impulse with great precedent. Histories are inherently palimpsestic, littered with strategies of appropriation that probe the limits of authenticity and truth. Ancient Greek sculptors copied from Ancient Egyptian precursors, and then had their works plundered and taken to Rome. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades are centred on the premise of annexation. Think, too, of Picasso’s raiding of so-called ethnographic collections in Paris, Richard Prince’s Marlboro Men, Barbara Kruger’s tussles with copyright law, École des Beaux-Arts plaster cast copyists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dot canvases and the international market for art forgery. It is clear that no one designs in a vacuum, that some of the most enduring artworks of the past two millennia have been the victim or product of ‘creative’ borrowing, and that these actions express and reveal power, agency and lack thereof. As the eminent art historian and cultural voice Thomas Crow reminded us two decades ago when interrogating conceptual art, ‘Almost every work of serious contemporary art recapitulates, on some explicit or implicit level, the historical sequence of objects to which it belongs. Consciousness of precedent has become very nearly the condition and definition of major artistic ambition.’⁶

As a consequence, art, architecture and design histories have developed a robust critical scholarship (from Jean Baudrillard’s theories of the hyperreal to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas) around questions of authenticity, the interplay between auratic original (Walter Benjamin) and mass-produced copy, and the notion of truth in disciplines that wrestle with their foundations in mimesis. Whether purloined in open homage, by stealth, by force or by other means, acts of translation and borrowing help us interrogate and reframe the myth of the lone genius and historic moments of discovery and examine notions of intellectual, cultural or political property in creative practises. Authenticity is not an a priori but a location that is inhabited – and shored up – by performance and public presentation. It is in the process of making a copy that the mechanisms, signs and strategies of authenticity imbued in the auratic original are revealed, offering insight into how such real-ness is performed.

***

In fashion, as in pretty much every other niche of design and the visual arts, knock-off goods are nothing new and, whether flagrant or subtle, they have often helped many of us access the identities we desire. Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel famously opined that ‘being copied is the ransom of success,’ and today the business of expiation on the fashion front runs a cool $600 billion profit worldwide.⁷ One of the many epicentres of counterfeit fashion (at least in old-school analog form) is the legendary Barras Market in Glasgow’s East End. An institution for over eight decades since its interwar founding, the site – shortened in Glaswegian parlance from its proper honorific, the Barrowland – sits next to the famed music hall of the same name; both monikers derive from the wheelbarrows from which the earliest traders sold their wares in the street.

On a recent dreich, grey December Saturday morning, where rain threatened but never quite made good on its promise to fall, the Barras was in full swing. Hawkers pitched their goods from stances in front of their stalls, all the better to entice the lacklustre crowds who were filing towards the newer, hipper craft and design market set up under cover, next to a bar-restaurant trading in oysters, cocktails and rapid gentrification. In May 2016, an undercover police operation saw over £30 million worth of counterfeit goods seized at the Barras, with the Scottish police heralding the action in the ensuing press coverage as a way to ensure the ‘regeneration’ of the area, now ‘free of criminality’⁸ – but a year later, tables, garages and dilapidated store fronts were still piled high with bric-a-brac, electronics, ceramics and boxes of goods straight off the back of a lorry.

Amongst the alleyways and courtyards, two men watched over one trestle table in particular and conducted a brisk trade. Their pitch was constantly mobbed with a steady crowd picking up plastic wrapped T-shirts and sweaters; the stallholders whispered prices to each customer in hushed tones so as not to undercut their next sale. A pair of Versace jeans with the stitching already unravelling was dispatched to a woman who had eyed them, rubbed their textile betwixt her fingers, and then cannily set them down and stepped away, only to be encouraged to open her purse for a knockdown price of twenty pounds. Two teenagers doing their Christmas shopping picked up Gucci shirts and haggled a two-for-one; a black Balmain sweater was stuffed into a blue shopping bag for an undisclosed price. Nike socks went, two packs for five pounds, at a nearby stall; next to them, white Apple earpods, unboxed, sold for a fiver a pair. I asked to take a picture and one of the stall owners stepped to the side; I could snap what I liked, he said, just not his face, as he was here illegally – his status on par with that of his merchandise. No one who walked away having made a purchase was under any illusion that they had scored a garment that genuinely came from its purported origin; and yet, each would be worn as such, the brand name logos an immediately recognisable currency.

At the Barras, the quickest sales were over the tracksuits – except that Gucci Gucci Louis Louis Fendi Fendi Prada, as the Kreayshawn song goes, were bumped for Kappa Kappa, Ellesse and Versace. Aside from a functional sports garment, the tracksuit has long been status attire (often extortionately expensive) in both subcultural and mainstream arenas. In fictitious settings, mafia men have made them their business attire (see, for example, half the cast of HBO’s The Sopranos). Banlieu graffiti kids wear them like a uniform in Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 cult classic La Haine. In film and TV, a generalised working class (satirised in the Little Britain character Vicky Pollard, and valorised by ‘Sporty Spice’ Mel C) wear tracksuits, using sports labels as personal and collective insignia. In the U.K., the two-piece ensemble has become shorthand for lager louts, football terrace hooligans (who favoured premium brand Stone Island) and streetcorner kids (pejoratively called chavs or neds), banned from certain schools and pubs in the era of the ASBO, when the ‘image of the hooded-youth gone feral on estates’ proliferated. This tough image was a badge of pride and fount of inspiration for those who felt an authentic connection with the street (see skate brand Palace, founded in 2009, and the Facebook group-turned-fashion label Wavey Garms, as well as rappers with their own lines like Jay-Z and Sean Combs). In turn, this became fodder for high-fashion brands to pedal clothing to those who wished to flirt with the aesthetics of the street corner without experiencing any drawbacks of the lifestyle, those ‘kids with privately funded accents dressing like they’re going for a fight in the dole queue.’⁹ This is no first: denim has been there before, as has the Mao jacket, plaid flannel shorts and almost every workwear brand (see: Carhartt, for example) now worn across brunch spots from Brooklyn to Tokyo. This counter-culture image of the tracksuit has become so literally fetishised that it has even found a place in pornography and sex work, where it stands in for ‘rough and hard masculinities, as opposed to the “cosmopolitan” and well-resourced gay man, so often portrayed through hegemonic forms of queer masculinity.’¹⁰

***

Researchers at Chapel Hill, Harvard and Duke have recently posited that while engaging with counterfeits is usually underscored with the intention of signaling positive traits (the ‘acting as if’ encouraged by Adler), the situation often ends up producing a surprising chain reaction: ‘a link from wearing counterfeits, to feeling “fake” or inauthentic, to behaving unethically.’¹¹ The research scenarios asked participants to engage in a range of tasks while wearing sunglasses, some of which the wearers believed to be fakes. The self-reporting of success or failure in the tasks by those wearing what they believed to be counterfeit goods was significantly manipulated in comparison to the control subjects (this played out in other test scenarios with other counterfeit goods within the experiment) leading the researchers to conclude that wearing fakes ‘increases actual dishonesty and perceptions of other people’s dishonesty … would be driven by people’s feelings of inauthenticity – their counterfeit self.’¹²

Yet, it seems as if, in the contemporary moment, acting as if in search of the authentic, happy self has in many cases metamorphosed not through the physical counterfeit but in the virtual realm that helps us transcend our ‘deficits’ (defined differently by us, no doubt, than by Adler a century after his theory). We live in the age of the Instagramable goal-a-day meme, the neoliberal incantation of fake-it-til-you-make-it, and the (now contentious) Amy Cuddy TED Talk-endorsed one-minute power-pose (in which Cuddy proposed that one can become assertive by standing legs astride and chest puffed out).¹³ While it is not a new impulse (see: 1980s Wall Street Yuppiedom), this type of transformation has been electrified and accelerated by social media, wherein whole personalities can be constructed, filtered, edited and disseminated. Even while the current zeitgeist relentlessly schills artisanal, organic, authentic, handmade, crafted, made-with-love, ethical products to clothe ourselves and our lives, and even as we rejoice, repost and embrace these values, they are in the majority in contradistinction to our actual lived existence and experience where we consume led by desire and not thought for human or environmental consequence. There is a disconnect between what we post and what we are, between what we say and what we do. Adler’s positivist theories of reinvention were genuine in their quest for socialist cohesion; millennial social justice mediated from behind the isolating glow of a personal screen can never match up. We are counterfeit selves, but not always because of what we wear.

Playing with identity through fashion – either through a typology like the tracksuit, or through the counterfeit more generally – is at the root of the transactions that take place at the Barras trestle tables and other sites like them, as well as in runway collections. While carefully counted notes are handed over in the heart of the east end of Glasgow, it is such working-class, post-industrial sites that have become inspiration to the certain contemporary designers – not just Bailey and Rubchinskiy, but also Demna Gvasalia’s Vetements. They have appropriated the readymade uniforms the Barras clientele are looking to shed – the postal uniform, the maintenance workwear worn in earnest – and the aesthetics they have cultivated unironically. The uniform of the person delivering the mail or restocking the shelves at the local supermarket has been elevated to the runway. Adler’s theory of acting as if has come undone in this co-option of the blue-collar uniform as fashion. As film theorist Nita Rollins reminds us, ‘Fashion’s ravenous cycles of emulation of those persons with some kind of prowess, be it economic or, in the case of punks, ideological, maraud through history’s closets to counter the mutability of the body, to climb the social ranks.’¹⁴ In the case of fashion’s relationship with authenticity – of self, of social standing or of inherent signification – what we wear is a powerful and radical conundrum in that we do not climb up or down, but within a complicated and radically compelling web of our own weaving.

Michelle Millar Fisher is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a Curatorial Assistant in the Architecture + Design department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she most recently co-curated Items: Is Fashion Modern?

Buy Vestoj: On Authenticity here.

1. Early in his career, in 1898, Adler’s commitment to workers and social justice manifested in scrutiny of the garment industry; he published the Medical Handbook for the Tailoring Trade, tracing illnesses and ailments specific to these particular workers. His aim was to demonstrate the structural nature of deprivation, material comfort and mental and physical health. J Richardson, ‘Work and the Life Meaning: The Relevance of Alfred Adler,’ in CrossCurrents 37, no. 4 (Winter 1987/8): 416–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24459369. ↩

2. See RE Watts, PR Peluso and TF Lewis, ‘Expanding the Acting As If Technique: An Adlerian/Constructive Integration’ in The Journal of Individual Psychology, Winter 2005. ↩

3. See the excellent exhibition didactics for ‘Trench Coat: From Field to Fashion’ that ran at the Winchester Discovery Center, Hampshire, October – December, 2014. ↩

4. The Anti-Social Behaviour Order was a civil order introduced in the UK in 1998 by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to curb petty misdemeanors. It was criticised for its demonisation of youth with few options and social resources. ↩

5. J and J Comaroff (eds.), ‘Law and disorder in the postcolony: an introduction,’ in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 14. ↩

6. T Crow, ‘Unwritten histories of Conceptual Art: Against Visual Culture,’ in Thomas Crow, ed., Modern Art and in the Common Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 564. ↩

7. R Elings, LD Keith and GP Wukoson, ‘Anti-counterfeiting in the fashion and luxury sectors: trends and strategies,’ in World Trademark Review, Anti-counterfeiting 2013 – A Global Guide. http://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/Intelligence/
   Anti-Counterfeiting/2013/Industry-insight/Anti-counterfeiting-in-the-fashion-and-luxury-sectors-trends-and-strategies ↩

8. BBC News, ‘Fake goods worth more than £30m seized in Barras crackdown.’ May 24, 2016. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-36359967 ↩

9. ‘Why Fashion’s Reappropriation of British Working Class Culture Isn’t a Bad Thing,’ Highsnobiety, January 28, 2016. https://hypebeast.com/2016/1/fashion-british-working-class ↩

10. M Whowell, ‘Male Sex Work: Exploring Regulation in England and Wales,’ in Journal of Law and Society 37, no. 1 (2010): 125–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622011 ↩

11. Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, ‘The Counterfeit Self: The Deceptive Costs of Faking It,’ in Psychological Science 21, no. 5 (May 2010), 712–20. Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Association for Psychological Science.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/41062274 ↩

12. Gino et al. 717. ↩

13. See: http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/
    dana_carney/power.poses.PS.2010.pdf ↩

14. N Rollins, ‘Greenaway-Gaultier: Old Masters, Fashion Slaves,’ in Cinema Journal 35, no. 1 (Autumn, 1995): 65–80. University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225808 ↩