When “decoupling” is increasingly becoming A reality between China and the United States, why are so many Americans keen to buy “super A” bags from China? Why did buying counterfeit luxury goods go from unethical to a ‘pleasant secret’?
- Have you ever fallen in love with a “dream bag”? During the height of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States, when it was drowning in breathless headlines, an enticing AD on a news website attracted Lina Wang, an editor at The New York Times Magazine. Suddenly, she became obsessed with a CHANEL bag that cost more than $5,000.
- For someone who came from a frugal immigrant family, wasting so much money on such a small luxury was a bit of a sin. It was during the COVID-19 quarantine period, and in her boredom and loneliness, she found a chat board (DesignerLuxuryBagsReps) discussing the purchase of ultra-fake luxury clothing, which gave her access to the huge market for ultra-fake bags. She contacted an agency in China via WhatsApp and hesitated for days to decide on a style. It was the middle of the night in China, but within seconds the agent replied: “It’s done. It will be delivered in about three weeks.” She only spent a few hundred dollars.
- In the days waiting for the package
- She often feared she would be caught by U.S. customs
- But the whole process is very silky.
- The package sailed across Europe and into New York
- Nothing unexpected happened
- The bag she’s been longing for looks real, doesn’t it
- The number and size of the stitches are flawless
- My only regret is that I chose the wrong color for my bag
- In China, this kind of bag has long had A name, called “super A” bag.
- Wang’s participation in this chat board and other similar knockoff communities is an open secret to big-name fans in the United States, and I myself joined the “dive” last year. At that time, another media in New York reported that many American women were keen to exchange their experiences of buying “super A” bags through these communities, including even millionaires with annual family incomes of millions and flying around on private jets.
- In these chat communities, members are candid, generously Posting detailed pictures of their purchases for quality verification and sharing the brands and contact information that particular sellers — almost all of whom are based in China, mostly through WhatsApp and Telegram — are best at copying. They can use Google’s Translate software to smoothly communicate details with sellers.
- When “decoupling” is increasingly becoming A reality between China and the United States, why do so many Americans, across the time difference and language barriers, place passionate orders to buy Chinese “super A” bags? The most immediate reason is that their quality is very reliable. These “super A” bags, Rina writes in her article, follow the fashion, use the materials carefully, and can fool the most trained eye. (The article provides a comparison of authentic and fake bags, and you can guess which ones are authentic.) Buyers largely no longer have to worry about their bags getting through customs, because even experts who inspect bags for a living can no longer pick up a clear sign of a counterfeit.
- Experts say they used to be able to identify details such as the number of stitches, but now even those details are so well done that they can only suspect that workers from the brands are taking the real leather out. Another professional quoted in the article revealed that some imitation manufacturers will buy the original leather of the same leather supplier of the brand in Italy, buy the real brand official bag to study the details, fine to reproduce every pinhole, every seam, and the price of the imitation is often only a fraction of the original. One Chinese seller I followed posted about the imitation process of a luxury bag: buying the real thing and completely disassembling it, studying the material of each layer of structure; Understand the brand of stitches and stitch method; Several experiments were carried out to determine the treatment technology of bag edge oil.
- A friend of mine said that she used to occasionally mix authentic designer bags with fake ones because she always had to wait for the counter to stock some of her favorite styles. She has almost stopped buying the real thing after unexpectedly discovering that the quality of the fake is enough. She said she bought fake goods because of a change in mindset, “I think the economic outlook is a little bit worrying, and California’s consumption level is surprisingly high, and you can’t spend money as freely as you used to.” It is not easy to make money, after all, we do not have money from wind, and I think it is better to spend spare money on my children’s education or save it as a pension.”
- Some of the younger consumers interviewed for this article argued that since it has long been fashionable in the fashion industry to borrow design inspiration from each other, counterfeiting luxury goods is not an immoral scandal, but a pleasant secret. Imitation bags are the “democratisation of fashion”, giving middle-class women the confidence to strut into the next world.
- What do you think of “Super A” bags? Would you voluntarily buy them, and why?
- You are welcome to discuss and share your experiences and opinions.