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, designer clothes shop or mall in your city. Buy an item of your favorite brand in a outlet store. All original stuff, the best textile craftsmanship. You are happy, saving and obtaining high quality made in Italy is not an everyday affair.

Are you sure this is the case?

Do you ever experience the unpleasant sensation of counterfeiting, showing off your personal object of desire at the events you attend?

If you have asked yourself the doubt even just once, like now while mentally answering my questions, you are in the right place. I want to open your eyes, make you more aware of what is happening around and what could have already happened to you without you realizing it.

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

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

You would be tempted, right?

Too bad it would be a fake, as distant from our local manufacturing ability as the ancient observer of the night sky was from the moon painted among the stars.

You have shown the right amount of curiosity so far and it must be repaid. The origin of this trafficking is Turkey, just over two hours' flight from our country.

For those who missed it, on October 29th the hyena Alessandro Politi entered for us into the meanders of Istanbul's grand bazaar, into secret bunkers under illegal shops and into these millionaire businesses that steal a large chunk of the stylists' earnings, in addition to theft of intellectual property.

It may seem like a small thing to you but behind the dress you wear, your favorite t-shirt and that pair of limited edition 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.

Let's proceed in the same footsteps as the hyena: the grand bazaar of Istanbul.

Thousands of square meters where it is possible to see hundreds of fake garments hanging, placed on stalls or shelves. A thriving business  under the (dis)attentive gaze of the local police.

Retail merchandise is sold at rock bottom prices, the location is  tourist destination and highly populated, both day and night, but it is enough to move to the most isolated areas, on the outskirts, to come into contact with the real traffic: buying wholesale means taking at least 5 pieces of each size of each chosen item available - less than €10 each - to make them yield ten times the value when placed on the market.

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

You may be wondering:

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

Soon said! The organization, well-established and tested, has devised over three ways of evading Italian customs checks.

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

Posing as an entrepreneur eager to "make a lot of money", he asked for guarantees for the transport and it was the traffickers themselves, in order to grab the new customer, who told him how to get everything, or almost everything, to its 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 fake designer labels 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 in opening a front company in Turkey with a share capital of a thousand dollars, connecting 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 naval routes which paradoxically facilitate the entry of fakes because they undergo fewer controls.

The network thus branched out, exploiting the various flaws in the control bodies, entails an entry value in Turkey of around 5 billion dollars per year and a loss suffered between the various falsified brands, among which mostly Italian names, between 10% and 15% of their annual turnover.

Dozens of factories, hundreds of underpaid employees who work incessantly to replicate thousands of garments and allow the hierarchies behind them to divide up the billions in loot.

And allowing the outlet store fraudulent people to join the raid, seeing deceptions.

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

I can't help but think about what Alessandro must have felt when he was told, in a superficial tone, how much is the "average salary" of the workers employed by the businessman who gave him, among other things, a tour of his factory of "fake 'author".

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

They work with the constant presence of the deafening noises of the 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 find the original items of the brands in the official stores, copy the concepts and test the result obtained until the degree of similarity diminishes, until it becomes the false twin of quality.

In fact, the hyena 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 orders. Not happy, he repeated the experiment in Italy, in via Montenapoleone, this time in the Fendi Store.

Different country, different brand, same result.

Reassured by the owner about the quality of the garment he was wearing, Alessandro leaves the shop dejected, perhaps defeated.

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

We are the ones who fuel this trade when we choose a outlet which perhaps doesn't even inspire us with all this confidence, attracted only by the potential savings on high quality. We are the ones who suffer the deception, who bow our heads to the price tag, who don't focus on why a piece from the current season can already be found in such shops.

Stores that should only have collections from previous years.

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

Decent, professional people for forty years, who wear what they sell and who would never dream of defrauding their customers.

Fakes do not enter, neither from the main entrance nor from the back door.

Because the concept of "author's forgery" has no reason to exist since Ideal Fashion.

Thanks to the hyenas and Alessandro Politi for inspiring me and helping to spread an important message: "You don't steal other people's work."