Designer handbags are a waste even if a person wants it to signal status. You can fake these bags easily. I’d rather splurge on a nice car bc you can’t really fake that. A 911 can’t be faked.
“After weeks, and hundreds of anxious Control-Rs on the DHL tracking page, and a daily pondering about what my mother might say when she encountered my mug shot on the evening news, my Celine Triomphe finally materialized — anticlimactically, in a manner much like anything else I’d ever ordered online. The box was lightly battered from having traveled through Abu Dhabi and, funnily enough, a network of shipping hubs across France and Italy before it landed in my lap in New York. I ripped open the tissue paper to extract the Triomphe, that glorious vessel, my purse of Theseus. By sight, nothing was detectable. I faithfully counted the stitches, measured dimensions. Underneath my hand, the leather did feel a bit stiff, rather less plush than the version I’d fondled for an unnecessary amount of time at Celine’s Soho boutique beforehand. But this giveaway, this “tell,” would graze against my shoulder and no one else’s.
A strange, complicated cloud of emotions engulfed me wherever I carried the bag. I contacted more sellers and bought more replicas, hoping to shake it loose. I toted a (rather fetching) $100 Gucci 1955 Horsebit rep through a vacation across Europe; I’ve worn the Triomphe to celebrity-flooded parties in Manhattan, finding myself preening under the approving, welcome-into-our-fold smiles of wealthy strangers. There is a smug superiority that comes with luxury bags — that’s sort of the point — but to my surprise, I found that this was even more the case with superfakes. Paradoxically, while there’s nothing more quotidian than a fake bag that comes out of a makeshift factory of nameless laborers studying how to replicate someone else’s idea, in another sense, there’s nothing more original.”
Can you tell the difference between a $10,000 Chanel bag and a $200 knockoff? Almost nobody can, and it’s turning luxury fashion upside down.
www.nytimes.com