Is fighting counterfeit knock-offs the new fashion cause célèbre?
Earlier this month, a Manhattan district judge ordered Guess to pay Gucci $4.7 million in damages over a claim that the designs were direct copies. Though the amount awarded was significantly less than what Gucci had asked for (a cool $221 million), it was still a victory on the copycat front. If there’s a big settlement in the trademark infringement suit that Christian Louboutin filed against Yves Saint Laurent last February, we could see many more.
France is doing its part to stop the sale of fakery. WWD reports that luxury group Comite Colbert has teamed up with French Customs and the French National Anti-Counterfeiting Committee to launch a massive ad campaign that will warn buyers about the perils of purchasing the cheap instead of the real. The effort — a total of 10,000 posters — will target thoroughfares in French airports.
Several major brands have collaborated with the campaign, including Cartier, Chanel, Christian Dior, Lacoste, Longchamp, Louis Vuitton, and Van Cleef. Here’s a sample tagline: “Buy a fake Cartier, get a genuine criminal record.”
Elisabeth Ponsolle des Portes, the president of Comite Colbert, alludes to the stringent anti-smuggling policies in America, and perhaps also makes a reference to the fashion world trademark cases that that have made headlines this year.
“We think it is strange that what has been done in the United States has not been done in France,” she told WWD.
It’s not the first time that the French have released a controversial campaign to fight counterfeiting or piracy. Last April, the Union of Professional Photographers attempted to fight widespread online photo theft with a racy ad: a man bending forward towards a camera on a tripod has been approached by another man from behind — the second man is pressed against the photographer in a way that leaves little to the imagination.
Yet, despite the new surge in the war on fake bags and shoes, there’s one pretty big holdout. Prada wasn’t on the list of collaborators, and in an interview with Bloomberg, Patrizio Bertelli — Prada’s CEO and Miuccia Prada’s husband — “shrugged off” the entire frenzy.
“Fake goods aren’t totally bad, at least it created jobs at some counterfeit factories,” said Bertelli. “We don’t want to be a brand that nobody wants to copy.”
Bertelli better hope that once the other fakes go away, his customers still prefer the $3,000 bag from the store and not the $30 bag from the street.