KEY POINTS:
Any receptionist at one of the big hotels in Shanghai can give you directions to the "Fake Market".
It's next to the mall that houses flagship stores for Prada, Fendi and Louis Vuitton. Authentic must-have totes and their cut-price simulacra sell side-by-side here. Tourists and fashion-conscious Shanghaiese can identify the new bag they want either in shop windows or in the advertising hoardings that cover the city, then head straight into the shabbier five-storey Fake Market and haggle over its $20 counterfeit twin.
Just because it couldn't exist in Britain doesn't mean there isn't the demand. Far from it.
On the British high street, selling "lookalikes" rather than exact counterfeits of designer goods (it is assumed that, to get around intellectual property law, the chains' lawyers routinely check that one crucial feature of a dress or bag is altered), the fast fashion retailers have managed to propagate the widely held belief that the cut-price version of a catwalk look is even cooler than the original. Jimmy Choo and Chloe are among those who have in the past month brought successful lawsuits against high-street imitators.
Copies, whether of movies or Gucci watches, are now far from being the illicit perk of the long-distance traveller to Hong Kong or New York's Canal Street.
These days, according to the latest research, Britons actively love fakes. They are buying them while on holiday in Europe, but also in online auctions and in markets at home.
Research shows that they perceive it to be a victimless crime and that perception isn't changed by the fact that very little seems to be done to stop it.
"Even just 10 years ago, if you wanted to get a knock-off, you had to be connected, have a source. A little bit like scoring Ecstasy," says Tim Phillips, author of Knock Off: The Deadly Trade in Counterfeit Goods.
"Now you only have to go outside your front door and go to your local market. It's not legal, but it has become legitimised."
Even celebrities, those privileged beings who routinely borrow hot-off-the-catwalk looks for free by fashion houses, are now admitting to buying fake designer accessories.
Actress Renee Zellwegger has said that she bought a counterfeit bag in Hong Kong. She may not be the pinnacle of chic, but when multi-millionairess Britney Spears carries a pale-pink fake Chanel bag, tweens everywhere get the message that cheating the luxury goods houses is cool.
This is a potentially disastrous turn of events for companies that trade on their aura of exclusivity and carefully nurtured relationships with Hollywood stars.
No wonder brands such as Louis Vuitton and Chanel (which, with Burberry, are the most copied) are fighting back on the A-list front.
When Courtney Love was photographed at a party this year wearing a fake Chanel dress, the fashion house was said to be incensed. In this month's US Harper's Bazaar, Love does penance, posing with jewellery just covering her nipples over the headline, "I'd rather go naked than wear fake".
Love claims she wore the copycat Chanel "inadvertently" . If so, she would be rather more gullible than the rest of us.
The reason Chanel et al have a problem with forgeries is that there is such a huge demand for them. More than ever, Britons are buying fake goods, knowing that they are fake - and not giving a damn. They are not put off by the loss to those brands' businesses, nor apparently by any thought of the organised crime that inevitably props up a global trade worth as much as $200 billion each year. And as the standard of those fakes improves, no longer is poor quality such a big issue for buyers.
While a minority will always prefer to know that they own and carry the real thing, there is a growing group who will buy both fake and authentic luxury goods. It's a misconception these days to think that the woman who carries an ersatz Louis Vuitton Monogram or Chloe Paddington bag is a young, low-income consumer who can't afford authentic goods.
According to a new study by the London-based law firm Davenport Lyons, two-thirds of those who buy counterfeit watches, handbags and clothes also buy genuine designer goods. In demographic terms, there is very little to distinguish the fake-buyer from the genuine-only buyer.
And increasingly, Britons are openly confessing that their Gucci watch or Mulberry bag isn't the real thing. Researchers say that up to two-thirds of Britons are happy to admit they buy fake goods - an increase of 20 per cent on last year.
As the global trade booms, an even wider range of spurious items is shipped across borders, with piracy affecting not just luxury goods but even everyday items such as toothpaste, toys and batteries.
Is fakery losing its stigma and, particularly in the realms of image and self-presentation, even becoming a kind of status symbol?
And if authenticity has become strictly optional, into which other realms of culture will that attitude spread?
In the past decade the attitude towards that other celebrity perk, plastic surgery, has also changed dramatically. Increasingly it is no longer shameful to fake a younger, sleeker, sexier physical appearance, particularly if "only" temporarily erasing crow's feet and facial creases with non-surgical injectibles such as Botox and Restalyne. Clinics report that men, for whom even make-up remains taboo, are increasingly turning to minor surgical procedures in the name of presentation.
"I saw my first client in London in 2000 and it was very different then. Secretive," says Wendy Lewis, a New York-based cosmetic surgery consultant who advises women in both the US and Britain. "People weren't talking about it. The mainstream broadsheet media and glossy magazines were only just starting to write about it. Now, there's so much information and so many clinics. It's a radical change."
With increased accessibility, says Lewis, fewer patients care about hiding the fact that their smooth foreheads or pert bosoms aren't quite as nature intended. "I see far more women now who say, 'I don't care who knows, I just want to do it for me'," she says.
The difference is no longer split so obviously by nationality, with British women now taking similar attitudes to their American counterparts. Instead, Lewis says, the divide is generational.
We can attribute changing attitudes to what used to be called "going under the knife", partly to easier access to procedures such as Botox but also, again, to an increasing openness among celebrities about their use of fakery.
In US Vogue last summer, Ellen Barkin and Linda Evangelista admitted to using Botox and fillers. The arrival of high-definition television means that every weather girl and quiz show presenter is likely to follow suit. It's only sensible they admit it, thinks Lewis, because, "We're too savvy now to believe that it's down to healthy living and good genes".
She encourages even her clients who don't want anybody to know about their surgery to admit "to something but not everything. Just to deny it will make you look foolish. There was a time when you could get away with saying you'd been in a spa. But those days are long gone."
Eventually, Lewis warns, we may find ourselves like New Yorkers - intolerant of naturally aged faces - and prefer fake youthfulness. "Where I live in the Upper East Side, if you see a woman with a lined forehead, she looks so old. And that effect will become more mainstream. In certain places in the world, everybody's had something done. And I think the trend will continue."
As surgery becomes more affordable, the frozen foreheads will multiply. And it will be pointless to deny needles have played their part.
Another piece of fakery we're only too aware of, and tolerate, is the art of the retoucher. If celebrity wrinkles aren't smoothed out in the Botox clinic, they will inevitably be obliterated by the retoucher's hand. We know about it because Kate Winslet complained that her thighs had been "slimmed" down for the cover of GQ magazine; because we have the Photoshop application on our own home computers; because the majority of fashion models appear to have entirely non-porous skin on their faces; because we don't only buy airbrushed glossies but also celebrity magazines with paparazzi shots of unretouched stars with mottled thighs and angry red zits.
It's our duty, of course, to pass this information on to impressionable children although chances are they've already airbrushed their own pictures for the approval of their fake Facebook friends.
The art of removing unwanted shadows, creases in clothing or even entire people from photographs is nothing new. Stalin used retouching in the cause of propaganda to erase out of official photographs those comrades who had fallen from favour.
But in the past decade, advances in technology have not only made fakery of our own snapshots possible, but the imagery in advertising and magazines ever-more unreal.
"There was little awareness about retouching when we started up in the Nineties," says Colin Hume of Shoemakers Elves, a company that specialises in retouching fashion shoots and beauty advertising campaigns. He perfects skin tones, brightens eyes and smooths out unsightly wrinkles on clothes for glossy magazines and fashion houses including Prada, Chloe and H & M. Yes, unattainable perfection now sells high-street clothes as well as designer labels.
"Now even children are aware it goes on. I went on a kids' show on T4 a few months back to demonstrate how we do it."
So it's a curious position. In many different ways - some subtle, some less so - Britain is becoming more fake with each passing year. But at the same time Britons don't like being duped.
As one TV editor notes, "It's all right for the Russians to fake news reports with footage from Titanic, but there's a feeling that such behaviour isn't very British."
Whether it's a knock-off handbag, a newsreader's youthful forehead or a trashy reality show, we've never been so accepting of fakes, and it's never been easier to falsify.
But these days only the fool won't admit that they're faking it - because it has also never been easier to get caught out.
- Independent
