There’s nothing worse than sifting through buckets in bargain stores and endless piles at car boots only to be left with a £3 vest from Primark being sold for a tenner. But with hard work comes reward and it’s the thrill of finding a designer handbag at a ridiculously low price that makes the hunt worth it. There’s just one problem… how do you know if it’s real?
According to Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, 2.5 percent of world trade is made up of counterfeit goods. Among these counterfeit items are ‘superfakes’, fake designer handbags that resemble their luxury counterparts so closely that telling them apart requires expert skills.
It’s no surprise that these items have crept their way into the vintage fashion market. In 2018, Chanel brought court action against The RealReal, a designer resale platform, alleging that the platform sold at least seven counterfeit Chanel bags. What’s more, in 2023, Cosette, a luxury fashion store in Sydney, Australia was accused of selling fake designer bags, with the store claiming they were unaware the items were fake.
With the increasing amount of ‘superfakes’ circulating on resale platforms and in real stores, it certainly means that these bags are hiding in thrift shops and being mistakenly labelled as authentic on Depop.
Jenna Padilla and Anastacia Black, the Co-Founders of the authentication company Realauthentication, warn that “Counterfeits are produced at many levels and the same style can be replicated in high grade form as well as low grade.” Spotting a high-grade fake is not easy: “Some styles have more checkpoints for identifying whether an item is counterfeit or not,” they explain in an email, “but there is not one singular brand or style that is hardest or easiest to identify as counterfeit, but rather comes down to the grade of production for any given item.”
They said that stitching and hardware are obvious giveaways of low-quality counterfeit items. For example, if the stitches are frayed or thick, it’s probably a fake. If the hardware seems plasticky or hollow, it’s also likely to be fake.
Charlotte Staerck, co-founder of The Handbag Clinic, designer handbag authenticators, restorers, and resellers, told Snatch that fake designer bags used to be hard to buy and rare commodities but with the rise of ‘superfakes’ that all changed. “The production of fakes is so fast now; they can make seasonal items. For example, the Loewe Puzzle bag blew up on social media and within months fakes were available,” she says.
Charlotte said that the most commonly faked bags are Louis Vuitton and Chanel and that most of the replicas are now made using real leather rather than cheap vinyl, especially Hermes bags, making it even harder to tell the difference between real and fake.
“The difference in quality between fake and real can be very subtle. Every single brand has its own set of characteristics but it’s also specific to the location that it’s made, and the year it was made,” she says. “It can be very subtle notes down to marginal thread counts, stitching, the thickness of a thread, and the exact pigment colour of that thread.”
But Charlotte said the best way to be safe is getting your item authenticated and focusing on buying items from the golden era of certain brands rather than modern items. She says look out for Hermes bags made before 2007 and Chanel piece made between 1990 and 1996. “If you find an amazing condition vintage Chanel you’ve won the lottery.”
Pictures: The Handbag Clinic
Designs: Pius Bentgens