The Beauty of Fake
One Thursday in late April, this spring’s collection of material girls turned out in droves.
Toting reluctant boyfriends and sipping high-priced mojitos, the ladies packed the humid basement level of the Plaza hot spot Re:Verse for a Coach fashion show. The concrete bunker known as the Red Room held low glass tables, ottoman-style bench seats and a giant mirror mounted on an easel.
The gala, part of Re:Verse’s “Epi-Curious Thursdays” — a new series of bashes allowing the Plaza’s potential customers and chic retailers to rub elbows — had been outfitted with all of the necessary accessories. A suited bouncer armed with a printed guest list stood near a small velvet rope upstairs. As she entered, each female guest was given a Coach-emblazoned shopping bag filled with freebies, a company catalog and various handbills and business cards for Plaza and Overland Park boutiques and salons.
On hand was the usual roster of Kansas City’s self-anointed club royalty — an assortment of blondes in sequined blouses and brunettes in cleavage-revealing tops, a duo of retail mavens from BCBG, former Mizzou quarterback-cum-bar-boy Corby Jones, and former Royal Brian McRae, who was clad in aviator sunglasses and a black leather jacket.
A bearded DJ spun a mixture of hard rock and funk. Women fronting Coach accessories sashayed to a small, red-carpeted platform in the center of the room, pivoted, then strutted deep into the crowd. To Plaza denizens, most of the models were recognizable. They’d been recruited straight from the shopping and bar scene, bolstering the event’s who-you-know aura.
First a Jackie O.-style brunette in a pink overcoat, bulbous sunglasses and a medium-size bag hit the runway. She was followed by a short-skirted “schoolgirl” flaunting her backpack and sucking a lollipop. A third woman carried a small handbag and wore two belts crisscrossed at her midsection like a modern gunslinger. Later, a lithe dark-haired woman, stripped to just a knotted white T-shirt and pair of Coach swimsuit bottoms, shook her booty for her peers.
The show approximated a game of little-girl dress up: Amid the thumping beats and numerous outfit changes, most of the merchandise was just reshuffled. There was a collection of oblong scarves in pink and green, khaki-print shoulder totes with hibiscus or turquoise leather bottoms, and this season’s marquee “Scribble” design: a white bag with a rainbow-colored version of the pattern that has become a company trademark — two opposing, horseshoe-shaped C’s.
Purses hung like price tags from the arms of each model, each bag’s size telegraphing its value. In general, medium-size bags retailed around $300. Larger, special-issue bags, such as the Scribble beach tote, cost more than $1,000.
High-end designers — Louis Vuitton, Prada, Burberry, Gucci, Kate Spade — price their goods similarly. The point of buying them: to show the world what you can afford.
Here in Kansas City, the fashion conscious have more to worry about than price. The couture supply is limited in Carhartt country. Coach might have a storefront on the Plaza, for example, but the closest Louis Vuitton dealer is in St. Louis.
While the status-bag set pines, more industrious women have figured out how to secure similar goods on the cheap.
The sales staff at chic bastions like Coach and Halls have been trained to spot the signs of a counterfeit purse — a slipped stitch, a crooked emblem, a mismatched pattern, unmonogramed lining. They tell sob stories about women who have tried to shop outside legitimate channels only to discover they’ve been duped, women who have left Halls in a huff after finding out their eBay bag is fake, a girlfriend crying inside Coach after learning her boyfriend gave her imitation goods.
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“Anyone who would buy a fake handbag wouldn’t shop in our store anyway,” says Marlo Thornton, a purse buyer at Halls.
But these purse players operate under a philosophy of sartorial existentialism: You think it’s real; therefore, it is real. They thrill to hear those simple words: “I love your purse! Where did you get it!”
The answer to that question was a trade secret. Until now.
At sunset on a recent weekday, a more exclusive basement party was going on. The gathering was concealed inside a large home amid a dozen other three-car-garage houses clustered near a manufactured lake. The perfect suburban camouflage.
Since noon, women had arrived in waves, parking their sedans and SUVs at intervals along the nondescript cul-de-sac. First were the stay-at-home moms, then the working-class wives, then the single girls. At the front door, they were met by a fortyish blonde with machine-tanned skin, dyed hair and suspiciously perky breasts pressing against a tight blue sweater. We’ll call her Debbie. She ushered the women inside.
Downstairs, six casually dressed twentysomethings congregated in what resembled a swap meet. The concrete floor was covered by area rugs, and three rows of black-cloth-covered tables were stacked with accessories — wallets, sunglasses, watches, umbrellas, belts, jewelry, day planners. Purses were draped from partitions that had been set up around the sale area, and shelves were piled high with larger accessories such as luggage, dog carriers and diaper bags in black, hot pink and green. Around them, the merchandise was arranged according to size, shape and, most important, by “designer”: Chanel, Burberry, Coach, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Christian Dior. Advertisements clipped from women’s magazines were mounted beside each display like exhibit tags.
From a distance, the product looked legit. Some of the wallets had crooked embossing, but the purses had straight stitching, near-perfect patterns and almost perfectly aligned trademark emblems. All were priced well below retail. Wallets for $15. Dog carriers for $26. Medium-size purses for $30 to $70. Diaper bags for $129.
The party was by invitation only. Today’s guest list had been provided by Carrie (not her real name), a mother who lives in Johnson County. She’d invited more than 60 people, recruiting the usual friends and friends of friends and friends of friends’ sisters through phone calls, cubicle convos and a massive e-mail blast sent a few weeks earlier.
“Hey girls, I wanted to invite you all to a purse and jewelry party,” the e-mail began. “I’m not a huge fan of the ‘knock off’ but these are REALLY good.”
Most of the guests were already familiar with the “purse party” concept. A vestige of the late ’90s, the PP is similar to a Tupperware party: A woman invites friends and a salesperson to her home for shopping and socializing. The host then gets a cut from the dealer’s proceeds to put toward her own purchase.
This wasn’t Carrie’s house, though it was technically her party. The basement and bazaar both belonged to Debbie.
Debbie had pumped up the purse-party model, furnishing a home base and inviting buyers to come to her. At the end of the room, she stood at a computer desk equipped with a credit-card machine. Seated at the desk was her accomplice, a middle-aged redhead in a ringer T-shirt who took money, surfed the Net and answered phone calls. They’d even printed business cards and set up a temporary Web site that offered a dubious disclaimer:
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We are in no way affiliated or associated with any of the authentic manufactures [sic]. The products on this website are for novelty purposes only. We do not represent our products to be original, nor do we represent that they are exact copies, therefore we do not violate any copyright laws.
Most of the women spent time figuring out how they were all associated with Carrie. The brunette checking diaper bags was a relative. The dark-haired woman ogling the Louis Vuitton was a co-worker. The short blonde obsessed with the Prada dog carrier — it would be perfect for her Chihuahua — was a friend from her college days at KU.
Carrie had been invited to a similar sale by a friend more than a year ago, she said. Since then, she’d decided to plan her own parties because hosts get a cut of the action.
“It’s a happy place,” Carrie says later. “During weekends or during the week, I don’t want to do anything but be at home. But this is exciting because it’s something to do without your boyfriend or husband or kids. It’s like the bag sisterhood. When you’re shopping for a purse underground, it’s like a purse high.”
Getting a deal on good fakes is harder than it might seem. Most bag sisterhoods built around the direct-selling model have disbanded, their secret meetings scuttled in the wake of a government crackdown.
Some places, such as shoe-repair shops in Grandview and Brookside, a bag shop in the Great Mall of the Great Plains in Olathe and a Chinese custom T-shirt store in the River Market, still sell paradoxically high-priced knockoffs or low-quality disposables over the counter. In the late ’90s, the FBI raided a Mission Hills home, emerging with boxes of fake Tommy Hilfiger clothes, Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton bags; a couple of similar busts went down over the next few years. More recently, Craigslist, an online forum on which vendors had posted hundreds of ads for parties and calls for hostesses in cities across the country, pulled listings related to fake purses. And the market imploded when news outlets learned that busting suburban spendthrifts made good television.
In November 2003, Inside Edition aired a segment in which the tabloid news show invited a New York purse salesman to a rigged hotel party, then confronted him. Since then, CBS News, People and Time magazines and The New York Times have produced their own versions of the exposé. In the past two years, under-the-table distributors have been busted in Philadelphia; Columbus, Ohio; Avalon, New Jersey; Clover, South Carolina; and St. Petersburg, Florida.
It seems that women with clutch fetishes have created a nagging problem for federal agents. Replica handbags are the third-most-frequently smuggled product entering the country, a staple in an underground economy that grosses roughly $650 billion a year, according to reports from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (a nonprofit agency that follows such trends). During a six-month period in 2004, Homeland Security agents seized nearly $7.3 million worth of merchandise at coastal ports — nearly double the amount snagged during the same period a year earlier. In June 2004, agents busted a New York smuggling ring with a bounty of wallets, handbags and luggage from China valued at $24 million.
Since 2004, Homeland Security and the International Chamber of Commerce (a global business-lobbying juggernaut) unveiled new plans to help coordinate efforts among state, national and international regulatory agencies.
Tote trafficking may not be a consumer-safety issue — they don’t rank with cut-rate medicines, substandard brake pads, defective plane parts, cheap cigarettes, leaky condoms or buzz-killing dud Viagra — but the secondary economy generated by the sale of ersatz designer handbags purportedly bankrolls shadier practices. According to a January IACC report, al-Qaida training manuals found overseas suggested counterfeit merchandise as a good way to generate startup capital for terrorist cells. And bag busts in New York City since 9-11 have turned up fake driver’s licenses, a list of al-Qaida suspects and flight manuals for Boeing 767.
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“Buying a counterfeit good is far from a victimless crime,” says Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office, which has become an extension of Homeland Security since 9-11. “It’s often paired with money laundering, narcotics, illegal gambling and prostitution, extortion and human trafficking.”
A war on totes seems unlikely, though. Tracking fake goods is part of the FBI’s approach to white-collar crime, but it’s seventh on a list of the agency’s priorities post-9-11, says Jeff Lanza, a special agent with the FBI’s Kansas City office. “That doesn’t mean that it’s never going to get addressed. It just means it’s a low priority for us at any given time.”
“Opportunists see it as a low-risk, high-reward scenario,” says Darren Pagoda, a former staff lawyer with the IACC who joined the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month. Federal penalties for first-time traffickers can be as much as ten years in prison and a $2 million fine, but sanctions are rarely that severe. “You have a much better chance of getting in trouble with 50 tons of crack than you do with 50 tons of watches or whatever the case may be,” Pagoda says. And unlike those caught buying dime bags, the purse purchasers themselves aren’t usually subject to prosecution. Ripped-off designers have for the most part remained composed, refusing to comment publicly about the problem. (In October 2003, Kate Spade Vice President Barbara Kolsun reported that fakes divert an estimated $70 million in the company’s potential profits annually.) Of the six outfitters contacted by the Pitch, only Burberry would go on the record with any complaints.
“Burberry takes counterfeiting extremely seriously,” says Robert Gardener, a London-based spokesman for the tan-plaid company. “We work with local authorities across the globe to tackle counterfeiting as high up on the supply chain as we can. Whenever a case is proven, Burberry will always push for the maximum penalty…. People need to think very carefully when they’re buying fake goods. Who has made this, and what organization are they are patronizing by their purchase?”
Coach, meanwhile, has appealed to consumer morality. The company’s Web site asks customers to report suspicious goods. “Your assistance is greatly appreciated and sends a strong message to counterfeiters that their illegal activity will not be tolerated,” the site reads. “And remember, if the deal seems to be too good to be true, it probably is.”
But behind the scenes, couture houses have taken the offensive, hiring large investigative agencies to flush out bad girls.
“The merging of the purse party with a more retail concept, the showroom, is a way of avoiding ongoing scrutiny but at the same time being able to sell on an ongoing basis,” says Vaughn Volpi, president of Professional Investigating and Consulting Agency, an international firm that works with many Fortune 500 companies. (If you own a handbag made by a big-name designer, Volpi says, “chances are, we represent them.”) He notes that caches of coastal leftovers continually wash inland. “Fashion trends last longer in the Midwest. A particular bag that might have a shelf life of six months in New York or Los Angeles would linger for two years.”
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For sisters in the metro, though, the accusation that they’re buying last season’s leftovers hurts more than the idea that they might be supporting terrorists.
Back when purse parties were in vogue, less than two years ago, soirées were popping up in midtown, Overland Park and the eastern suburbs. The women, who ranged in age from college student to geriatric, said they enjoyed combining their two most devilish habits: gossip and shopping.
“Basically, for me, it’s just seeing knockoffs themselves,” says Nikki (not her real name), a government worker in her midtwenties who has hosted a 20-person bash in her Lee’s Summit home. “As women, we love purses. I can’t help it. I knew they were knockoff bags, but the person who does the parties doesn’t promote them that way. That’s the thrill of it — getting new purses cheaper than you can buy the real ones.”
One hairstylist at a Plaza salon, a former guest of Nikki’s, says she relished passing off her purchases as real.
“We have women who come in [to the salon] and say, ‘My gosh, I have the same thing in red,’ and they paid $500 and I paid $50,” she says. “In Kansas City, we’re not as metropolitan as other cities, so it’s not like people are really going to know here if it’s real or not — if it’s a quality knockoff.”
Another purse buyer, a mother of two in her late thirties named Heather who works for a pro sports team, fondly remembers 30 people in her living room looking at more than 150 handbags draped over every bookcase, table and couch. She decided to throw her party after visiting a similar event held by a co-worker. She says the groupthink at her gathering assuaged any worry about wrongdoing.
“Maybe you’re getting something less expensive and doing it together makes it feel OK,” Heather says. “There were people who had no intention of buying things. They just came for the camaraderie, I guess.”
One former supplier says she never worried about getting in trouble just for sharing a good bargain.
Missy Hutton, a real-estate agent in Leawood, moonlights running a door-to-door accessory business with her sister, Cami. (They call it Two Chic Sisters.) When they started in fall 2002, she and Cami spent their first eight months dealing knockoffs. They worked two to four parties a week, sometimes unloading 400 purses a month.
“I don’t know where it all came from,” says Hutton, who brokered though a friend with a similar operation in St. Louis. “It came from the East and West coasts, but I was basically paying the middle man to get them.”
The sisters stopped selling contraband because the market was flooded, she says. Now they sell legitimate T-shirts and belts by independent designers to women at KU sorority houses and at fund-raisers such as the Junior League of Kansas City’s Holiday Mart.
“If you find anyone who’s still doing it, it’s hush-hush,” Missy says of the purse-party heyday. Most former guests say they no longer get e-mails from their former dealers. “If they’re doing it, they’re keeping it pretty quiet, because I don’t know about them.”
One evening in late April, Carrie curled into an oversized chair in her Johnson County home. Her daughter sprawled on the carpet doing homework, surrounded by a sampling of her mom’s bag collection: two Coaches, two Pradas, a Louis Vuitton, a Marc Jacobs and a Nine West.
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Carrie scrutinized them like suspects in a police lineup, trying to remember which four were fake.
She owns other premiere faux bags, she says, including a counterfeit of this season’s hottest it bag.
“I wouldn’t say I have one particular brand I like most,” Carrie says. “I wouldn’t say I have a lot [of purses], but I have enough to change with each outfit. I change purses literally every day.”
Carrie got her first status bag from her mother as a high school graduation gift in the early ’90s. She remembers it fondly: a leather, hunter-green, medium-size Dooney & Bourke, retail value $350. As a freshman at KU, she carried that DB with her daily. “It was a big deal,” she says. “And I was all about it. I would carry it still if it were still in style.”
Since then, purses have become her favorite accessory. Style is a continuum, each season made up of days filled by numerous events that need accessorizing. And then there’s the psychological component — making sure mod matches mood. (This is exactly the premise of Coach’s summer catalog, which advertises a different bag for each sunny-day commitment — garden party, ladies lunch, pool party, mixed doubles, picnics, lawn parties, a summer dance — and for the modern woman’s disposition — something fun, something sweet, cool and collected. )
When a friend invited Carrie to a purse party at Debbie’s back in 2004, she came reluctantly. She’d already been to gobs of what she calls “sell thing” parties, browsing stacks of Tupperware, kitsch jewelry, kitchen supplies, candles, silver and Mary Kay, and she’d hated all of them. At each, she’d felt pressure to buy impractical goods, she says. Though she’d never been to a purse party, she figured the shindig would be flawed by its similar design. “You only have the options of what’s in front of you,” she says. “Whatever they bring, you’re locked into.”
Debbie’s place was different. Debbie’s place was empowering. There, she recognized bags she’d seen in the issue of Cosmo that was still on the newsstand. Debbie’s place had the depth to fill her closet.
At home, surveying the array of bags at her feet, Carrie plucked a real $450 Prada her husband had bought her as a gift a few years ago and compared it to a similar $60 bag she acquired recently.
“I have no remorse for the big companies. I’m not thinking on that level,” she says. “I think the majority of people I’m friends with have the means to buy bags but would rather not. Now I feel, as many purses as I like to have, I can have triple the amount for the same cost of a real bag. “[At Debbie’s] you could take care of the want — I’m not going to say need — and do something else with the money.”
After previewing the potentials, Carrie got in deep. Fast. In a year and a half, she’s already hosted a handful of parties at Debbie’s house and is collecting a cut, which she counts in new merchandise rather than in dollars. “Any given sale gives you about $300 to $500 in merchandise,” she says. “That money goes a lot further [in the underground market].”
At one point, she thought of starting her own business, then reconsidered. “It’s the perfect job, but it’s illegal,” she says. “I want to invite people who would appreciate it there and be fun and excited. I don’t invite everyone I could. I don’t do a blanket invitation to all my acquaintances, the first reason being, I don’t want anyone I don’t know real well to come. I don’t want too many people to ask about it. To tell the truth, I don’t know the answers.”
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In Debbie’s basement, the candles set on various tables have burned low. Rock and roll still blasts from a hidden radio. Some women have been there for more than an hour.
“You’ll never want to shop somewhere else, because you won’t be able to stop thinking about it,” Carrie says to no one in particular.
“I’ll take one of everything,” says one shopper as she sets down her doggy tote and shifts positions to better survey the Prada section.
Before arriving, she announces, she had promised herself that she wouldn’t buy anything. But now she wants two Prada bags, one sleek, black and formal, the other pink and causal. Both are less than $30. She pulls out her checkbook.
While she’s standing near the desk, Debbie’s redheaded accomplice asks the shopper to sign the company mailing list, a bound book filled with fresh signatures. The shopper wonders how such an awesome sale could really be happening. She asks the accomplice how she and Debbie got started.
They’ve been hawking for five years, the woman says. She and Debbie met when they both worked dead-end jobs in the same shopping center. Debbie used to work at a salon and also pushed jewelry in the door-to-door racket. After orbiting each other at a few social events, Debbie offered the accomplice a piece of the action.
When they expanded into the handbag market, they soon realized that bags are a bitch to haul, so they quit their day jobs and set up a shop. The goods come from all over: New York, Arizona, Hong Kong. They work three days a week, but they’ll show up whenever guests call for an additional appointment. Parties can even be extended to multiday events.
Debbie emerges from an area behind the paneled showroom, carrying a cardboard box the size of a suitcase. Despite the water heater and exposed piping, the space behind her resembles a makeshift stockroom, with more handbags littering a couch hemmed by stacks of cardboard boxes. Debbie kneels and opens the package, revealing scads of key chains and trinkets. She runs her hands though them.
“Whatever you want, just let us know and we’ll order it,” she coos.
