Being from one of the world’s fashion capitals, it’s not hard to spot great style. Striking up casual conversation with someone can easily lead you to fashion’s hidden gems, jaw-dropping sales or the season’s must have items within your budget. One afternoon, while walking down Queen Street, I noticed a young woman with the leather, crocodile embossed bag I had been eyeing for a couple of weeks. Of course, I did the typical female thing and complimented her on a great purchase. While expecting her to give a pretentious “thanks” and walk away, I was unprepared for the secret she was about to let me in on.

“A girl from my work sells them,” she said in secrecy, with a sly grin. It was if she had just robbed a bank and was about to share some of her stolen currency with me. “She sells everything…anything you’ve seen, she can get,” she continued. The young woman is probably not a thief nor is she a supporter of sweatshops, gang violence or the drug trade. At least not until now.

Designer labels once conveyed status and wealth for the bourgeoisie, but thanks to capitalism and pumped up marketing schemes, luxury brands have made high-fashion, high-priced items accessible to middle-classed, average citizens. Something that in the late nineteenth century was unheard of. Former family owned companies that were restricted to the rich and famous are now corporate entities with storefronts on the trendiest street corners.

In the New York Times Bestseller, Deluxe: How Luxury lost its luster, author Dana Thomas analyzes the current state of the fashion industry. “More than anything else today, the handbag tells the story of a woman: her reality, her dreams,” Thomas reveals as she delves into the obsession with handbags.

So who could be blamed for wanting one? The “IT” bag may be a drop in the bucket for those who can afford one, but for others it may imply a month without fine dining or social activities. For people who fall just below both categories, a designer item is probably not a need, but a well-deserved want and if you can get what you want at a fraction of the cost, why not take it right?
I was surprised when I discovered the truth about counterfeit items. I had turned a blind eye to the phenomenon, until the facts and numbers hit me.

The International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, (IACC) is the world’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to protecting intellectual property and discouraging counterfeiting. According to the IACC, counterfeiting -which dates back to about 100 BC- costs North American businesses $200 to $250 billion annually and is responsible for the loss of more than 750,000 American jobs. About 5%-7% of the world trade is in counterfeit goods.

In 2008, the city of New York ran an ad in Times Square and Chinatown to alert tourists about the affects of buying counterfeit goods.

One ad says, “When you buy counterfeit goods, you support child labour, drug trafficking, organized crime and even worse…” The reality is, children working in unsafe conditions in sweatshops produce thousands of counterfeit bags daily. Not only are the conditions poor, so are the wages. While doing research for her book-which included visits to counterfeit factories that employed child labourers- Thomas was told a story about a factory owner who had broken the children’s legs and tied the lower leg to the thigh so the bones wouldn’t mend. All because they wanted to go outside and play.

Large, cosmopolitan cities like New York, Los Angeles and Toronto are havens for counterfeit vendors. Tourists often visit these cities to get much acclaimed bargains and end up walking away with more than they ever imagined.

Here in Toronto, there are several flea markets and street vendors carrying counterfeit goods, but some of them look so real, it’s hard for the untrained eye to pick up minor differences. For *Melanie Wright, a sales associate in the retail industry, it’s quite easy to distinguish the real from the fake.

“You can just tell by the quality of the leather or the way the material looks at different angles,” she says. “Also the interior of the bags are often different, especially with the Louis Vuitton and Chanel knock offs.”

She sees dozens of bags daily and notes that there are other obvious signs to spotting a fake. Quality is a dead giveaway. Chances are, if there is loose stitching, crooked logos or tarnished hardware, the item is counterfeit.

Counterfeit goods come in many forms such as pirated movies and music, shoes, hardware, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, electronics and just about anything you can think of. The next time you consider purchasing a counterfeit item, think about how many people your purchase will affect (globally) and also the fact that in a trendy city like Toronto, it is quite likely that people will be able to tell your fake from afar.