Rafael Ng
it serves as the main thoroughfare for drivers from Brooklyn by way of the Manhattan Bridge to Newport, New Jersey via the Holland Tunnel; more importantly, the street is the boundary between several of Manhattan’s neighbourhoods, primary among them are SoHo and Chinatown, respectively polarised purveyors of luxury and cheap goods. On cobblestone streets like Greene, one can acquire $5,000 Chanel handbags, not to mention Sartorialist street photoshoots and shiny sports cars; opposite are grimy streets like Mott and Mulberry, with their overflowing storefronts and that Chanel counterfeit, sold for $50. Canal Street is the very collision of capital systems: the official and in its shadow, the doppelganger, the content that drives globalisation and its fallout. 3 Strip away these environments, and in many cases the two handbags are identical, if not by touch, certainly in sight. The truth with fakes is that the form is not so essential – it is arbitrary, and teleological value is interchangeable at best. 4
There are forms today that appreciate a reverence near holiness, curves that seduce us to stand in line for hours, or that compel us to browse, stalk and later place bids on eBay; today, iPhones, Playstations and Red Octobers have arguably more societal force than lawmakers – they both shape and make news and they can also earn a company more money than certain nations make altogether. Some of these forms are absolute, there is no mistaking an iPhone, but others share a reverence through relativity, not special for its uniqueness but rather its species. Each morning, as I walk down Canal Street in New York City, it is obvious to me that one such relative object is the handbag. On a tattered blanket laying on the sidewalk, rest these prized objects with names like Michael Kors, Chanel, Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton. Their forms look familiar and the colours are never objectionable; they are selected to push the most sales and the least second-guessing. Yet on Canal, these objects are not real but counterfeits, illegal copies of the revered thing, and as such, they seem insignificant and demand to be despised. But is there more to value? What lies behind these counterfeit forms? –– By mid-morning on an August day, Canal Street is overwhelming, and here perhaps better than anywhere else in the city is New York at its liveliest and most chaotic. Across ten city blocks going east to west, Canal encounters every major subway line as the system funnels towards Lower Manhattan;
81
3 The World Customs Organization (WCO), under its Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Enforcement program calls counterfeit trade, ‘the black sheep of globalisation’ 4 By and large, fake handbags can be broken into four categories: (1) is the non-fake, one that looks something like how a designer handbag should look like, but is not a copy; (2) is the fake designer handbag, but mysteriously, and upon the versatility of the vendor, has interchangeable nameplates: a Prada tag replaced by a Coach tag; (3) is what we typically consider a fake, a bag that looks like the real thing, but feels nothing like it, built with cheap materials and hastily constructed; and (4) is the superfake, ones built so much like the original, they are hard to discern.
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator