Have you ever had doubts about the authenticity of a product?

 Have you ever had doubts about the authenticity of a product?

Black friday 2019.

Any fashion street, a designer clothing store, or a shopping mall in your city. Buy a piece from your favorite brand in an outlet store. All original stuff, the best textile craftsmanship. You are happy, saving and getting high-quality made in Italy is not an everyday deal.

Are you sure it's like that?

Have you ever felt the unpleasant sensation of counterfeiting, flaunting your personal object of desire at the events you attend?

If you have ever had the doubt, even just once, like now while you mentally answer my questions, you are in the right place. I want to open your eyes, make you more aware of what is happening around and that may have already happened to you without you noticing.

The Italian fashion industry has suffered repeated attacks with the massive importation of counterfeit items of the most prestigious brands. An overwhelming frequency on a monthly, weekly, daily basis.  and an illegality under our naive and dreamy gazes, while we admire a pair of jeans that would fit us perfectly, from the other side of the window.

What if I told you that there is a place where just a few dozen euros are enough to get a complete Gucci, Fendi, Prada, or any luxury brand?

You would be tempted, wouldn't you?

It's a shame that it would be a fake, as far from our manufacturing skill as the ancient observer of the night sky was from the moon painted among the stars.

So far, you have shown the right amount of curiosity and it deserves to be rewarded. The origin of these traffics is Turkey, just over two hours by plane from our country.

For those who may have missed it, on October 29, the hyena Alessandro Politi entered for us into the depths of the grand bazaar of Istanbul, in secret bunkers beneath illegal shops and in these million-dollar businesses that steal a large slice of profit from designers, in addition to the theft of intellectual property.

It may seem like a trivial matter, but behind the outfit you wear, your favorite t-shirt, and that limited edition pair of shoes, there are people, people who design and test until they are satisfied with their work and until we are satisfied with what we buy.

We proceed in the same footsteps as the hyena: the grand bazaar of Istanbul.

Thousands of square meters where you can see hundreds of fake garments hanging, laid out on stalls or shelves. A thriving trade  under the (in)attentive eyes of the local police.

Retail goods are sold at rock-bottom prices, the place is  A tourist destination and highly populated, both day and night, but just move to the more isolated areas, in the suburbs, to come into contact with the real trafficking: buying wholesale means taking at least 5 pieces of each available size of every chosen item - less than 10€ each - to make them profitable, entering the market, a value ten times higher.

The incredible thing is that there are also many Italian entrepreneurs fueling this illegal migration to Italy and Europe: they place substantial orders, mix the fake with the original, and pour the altered stocks like a virus into various stores, often unaware of the steps that have taken place. 

Perhaps you are wondering:

“But how do they manage to bring counterfeit products into Italy?”

Easily said! The organization, well-rooted and tested, has devised over three methods of evading checks at the Italian customs.

I have no answers if these are the only methods employed, we only know what has come to light thanks to Alessandro's work.

Pretending to be an entrepreneur eager to 'make a lot of money', he asked for guarantees for transport and it was the traffickers themselves, to secure the new client, who listed how to get everything, or almost everything, to the destination. 

There are those who prefer to have the imitated garments shipped inside car engines, hidden, or those who proceed by making two shipments, one with the counterfeit brands and the other with the labels to then 'reassemble' the clothes in Italy.

Or the last one.

The definitive one, the one considered the safest, which consists of opening a front company in Turkey with a share capital of one thousand dollars, linking it to the account of a marketplace, such as Amazon or Aliexpress, and declaring the presence of a fictitious warehouse in the Turkish country. These multinationals already have commercial agreements with shipping routes that paradoxically facilitate the entry of fakes because they undergo fewer checks.

The network so branched out, exploiting the various flaws of the control bodies, has an entry value in Turkey that hovers around 5 billion dollars annually and a loss suffered among the various counterfeit brands, among which mainly Italian names appear, between 10% and 15% of their annual turnover.

Dozens of factories, hundreds of underpaid employees working tirelessly to replicate thousands of garments and allow the hierarchies behind to share the billion-dollar loot.

And by allowing fraudulent outlet stores to join the raid, seeing deceptions.

How would you feel working ten hours or more a day for €500 a month?

I can't help but think about what Alessandro must have felt when being told, in a superficial tone, what the “average salary” of the workers employed by the businessman who also gifted him a tour of his “counterfeit” factory amounts to.

Desperate people who see, in  a few hundred euros, the difference between a life of hardship and a small economic security.

They work with the constant presence of the deafening sounds of sewing machines, which never stop and produce sweaters, shirts, and jeans that will invade the markets of Europe.

The climax of the assembly line.

First, you need to recover the original items from the brands in the official stores, copy the concepts, and test the result obtained until the degree of similarity thins out, until making the counterfeit a twin of the quality.

The hyena indeed decided to verify the degree of counterfeiting of the products, going to a D&G store in Istanbul and obtaining full certification of authenticity from the owner and the salespeople. Not satisfied, he repeated the experiment in Italy, on via Montenapoleone, this time in the Fendi Store.

Different country, different brand, same result.

Reassured by the owner about the quality of the worn garment, Alessandro leaves the store disheartened, perhaps defeated.

But it is not him who should feel this way, but us.

It is us who fuel this trade when we choose an outlet that perhaps doesn't inspire us with all this trust, attracted only by the potential savings on high quality. It is us who fall for the deception, bowing our heads to the price tag, not stopping to think about why a piece from the current season is already found inside such stores.

Stores that should only have collections from previous years.

Choose the best for you, only go to trusted outlet stores, like the one from Ideal Moda, which has always offered the highest quality of all the seasons it has dealt with over the years, or visit their first store and dare, look, feel the true made in Italy, strictly chosen for you by Giuseppe and Daniele, the owners.

Good people and professionals for forty years, who wear what they sell and would never dream of cheating their clientele.

Counterfeits do not enter, neither through the main entrance nor through the service door.

Because the concept of “counterfeit” has no reason to exist from Ideal Moda.

I thank the hyenas and Alessandro Politi for inspiring me and helping to spread an important message: “You don't steal others' work.”