Rafael Ng
While the real can be celebrated for its logistical gymnastics – designed in a fashion house in New York City or Paris, with materials sourced internationally, often fabricated in China and finally from there, shipped around the world – the fakes deserve as much awe for sharing the same production chain but operating from the dark. In fact, counterfeits prove to be a resilient mirror of luxury capital, emerging in the same global markets. According to the World Customs Organisation’s 2010 Intellectual Property Rights report, the United States places highest among destination countries as ranked by reported seizure numbers. Yet very little of New York City possesses the shadowy spirit best suited to the sales of counterfeit handbags. With so many procedural reviews to building construction, at nearly every level from state to property, architects and planners are constantly negotiating several codes and satisfying review boards, so it is surprising to find a shantytown-like exception on Canal Street. If on the one hand, New York City shopping is defined by the Sex and the City glamour, as evidenced by the tour buses that pass by, its double is the informal buildout on Canal. On average, the stores are ten to fifteen feet wide and open, that is they have no doors, no enclosure except for metal shutters dropped at close. Here there are no architectural dilemmas of threshold, no environmental challenges to overcome, no thermal breaks, no air conditioning. In other words, the curatorial window shopping experience that New York helped to define is absent. The openness seeps into the architecture eliminating the wall boundary, pushing the street edge into a series of unfolding surfaces, little crevices carved into the urban valley poché like the nave chapels of Brunelleschi’s Santo Spirito in Florence; here, we can revere the holiness of consumerism.
Inside, the spaces vary – fifteen, thirty, forty-feet deep. They are finished with the ubiquitous four by eight foot white-painted MDF slatwall panel: three-quarters of an inch thick mounted directly to furring strips, with horizontal slots three inches on- centre, and matched end-to-end to spread continuously over every surface of wall space: a display infrastructure perfected. While this architectural simplicity seems to undermine the complex network that delivers us this space, its fleetingness and cheapness adds to the system’s resilience, and in five days, a space can be built and fully stocked. The real fake handbags, however, have effectively moved out of these stores after raids in 2008 when then-Mayor Bloomberg effectively shut down the Counterfeit Triangle (bounded by Canal, Walker and Centre streets) following a stern policy to protect trademarks and citing that the city was losing nearly a billion dollars in sales tax. Instead, the resilient shadow market moved out of defined spaces and into the amorphous street. On braver days, the handbags lie on blankets at key street corners; on a typical one, the street vendors whisper into passing ears, ‘Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton’, pulling out a print or an iPad displaying a catalogue of bags numbered like a menu at a restaurant. Once selected, as in a scene from The Wire , the number passes from one person to the next, eventually to the corresponding oversized bag, or van, or hideout house for pickup, and is returned to the shopper: an urban and nebulous network made of salesmen, watchmen and runners.
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