Mayor: Knock Off the Knockoffs

Sacks and drugs.

You want to talk addictions? Drugs, you knew. But sacks — handbags, purses — are the next frontier. Every day, another sweet-face gal gets hooked on some high-price pocketbook she can't afford. Pretty soon she's jonesing so bad for Marc Jacobs, she's willing to break the law.

She comes to New York and buys a counterfeit.

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg held a press conference to announce a seizure of $1 million worth of just such ganja — er, goods — down in Chinatown's notorious "Counterfeit Triangle" (32 storefronts bounded by Canal, Walker, and Centre streets). Most of the booty had already been hauled away in tractor trailers, but a goodly sample was arrayed around the podium, prompting one reporter to ask: "What are you going to do with it now?"

"You want to buy some?" the mayor asked.

I'd swear I saw some heads nod.

Look, if there's $1 million of fake goods stashed along one dingy strip of Chinatown, you know that, just like crack, there's plenty more where that came from. Nationally, counterfeiting is a multibillion-dollar business.

That means loads lost in tax revenues, of course. And smuggling. And organized crime. But even more galling, somehow, is that some companies have been counterfeited so prodigiously that none of their stuff looks like the real McCoy. I see someone with a Hermès handbag and, unless it's Carla Bruni, I just assume she got it on Canal Street.

"Counterfeiting has been with us for hundreds of years," an attorney who works with Rolex, Brian Brokate, said. "But the mid-1980s is when the American consumers began to have a real thirst for branded goods, luxury goods." That's when counterfeiters started turning their attention to the new coin of the realm: labels.

Today, Mr. Brokate said, "each new brand that comes of age is going to have a counterfeit problem at some point. It's not a passing fad."

No, the fad part seems to be the new attitude shoppers have toward buying these knockoffs. Any shame seems to have been replaced by glee.

"If I had told my mother 10 years ago, 'Oh, mom, I'm going to go to New York to shop,' it would have been, 'Drive to New York? It takes us six hours!'" a fashion professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Holly Price Alford, said. "Now she'll hop in the car to get a knockoff."

When that woman gets home, it's anybody's guess what she'll tell her friends. There's joy in appearing rich, but there's also joy (don't I know it!) in bagging a bargain. And now there's a new kind of joy, too.

"You get sort of a double punch," consumer anthropologist Robbie Blinkoff said. "It's like, 'I wouldn't be caught dead with a Louis Vuitton, because I'm not actually a Louis Vuitton person. I'm a Louis Vuitton person who's smarter than that.'"

Irony, elitism, hipster-ism, penny pincher-ism — they're all rolled into one. And what they're rolled into looks lovely.

"The fakes used to just slap the name Prada on whatever," an editor at stylediary.net, Patricia Handschiegel, said. "But now they actually make the bags look like the ones in the collection."

Knockoffs have gotten so good, I met a customer in the Gucci store on Fifth Avenue who buys fake and real Guccis almost indiscriminately. "I just like them," she said. Though, she warned, "if you wear a knock-off, the handles start fraying."

Around us, the shelves were gleaming with non-fraying bags costing thousands of bucks, some heartbreakingly beautiful, some looking just like the ones on the street. Why pay a fortune for them?

"You don't have a right to steal somebody's property just because you think it's overpriced," the mayor chided at his press conference.

We don't? Well then, what do we have a right to steal?

Oh. I get it. Goodbye, Canal Street. Hello, rehab.

lskenazy@yahoo.com