Dressed in a white lab coat, Mélissa B. slips on thin cotton gloves and gently places a Zanzibar blue Hermès Birkin bag, its iconic orange box, a cloth dust cover, and various documents on her desk. She steps back to eye the $18,000 purse, hunting for any bulges or bends. She runs her fingertips along the top, then picking up her pocket-size magnifying glass, she leans in to examine a palladium plate on the flap. The logo has evolved over time, but the engraved text has remained sharp and well-defined, with the characters evenly spaced. “This is one of the key Birkin features to check,” she says.
She shifts her gaze to the stitching, checking for consistency and uniformity. The four palladium feet on the bottom of the bag get a check to ensure they’re made of the same metal as the rest of the hardware, and that they’re hammered, not screwed, in place. Then she homes in on the zipper—ensuring it’s one made by Hermès in-house, with its distinctive H-shaped stopper at the end.
Mélissa is among dozens of pokers and prodders employed by French luxury resale website Vestiaire Collective at its authentication center in the northern French city of Tourcoing. The facility, in a former wool-spinning mill, is the first and largest of five such locations the company runs worldwide. In the warehouse-like room filled with rows of desks and multiple garment racks on wheels, Mélissa and her colleagues examine bags, skirts, shoes, and myriad other luxury products listed on the site. They’re tasked with the Sisyphean job of detecting counterfeits coming from increasingly sophisticated operations, sometimes made with leather from the same tanneries and hardware from the same vendors as the originals.
Mélissa (the company declined to provide many team members’ full names for fear they might be poached by competitors) lifts the Birkin to her nose, shuts her eyes and sniffs the supple leather from top to bottom, breathing deeply to take in the scent. “It smells almost sweet,” she says. Finally, she checks the bag’s box, examining it with a handheld UV light, and looks over the invoice and proof of purchase. “This one,” she says, “is very real.” Time elapsed: 15 minutes.
Fighting counterfeiters is crucial to purveyors of secondhand luxury goods as their sales continue to rise—up 7%, to more than $50 billion, in 2024, according to Bain & Co.—outpacing the market for new luxury products. Vestiaire Collective’s revenue jumped 20% last year, though the private company declined to disclose its full results. Sales at the RealReal, a San Francisco-based rival that also has more than a dozen physical outlets, climbed 9.3% in 2024, to more than $600 million. And Vinted, Europe’s largest resale marketplace, launched a luxury category in 2023 that it says, without providing details, is thriving. With tariffs already raising prices for luxury goods imported to the US by at least 10%, and the risk they may go much higher, the secondhand market will likely keep growing.
All the more reason to authenticate. In 2021 less than a third of the items Vestiaire rejected were spurned on suspicion of being counterfeit. Today it’s more than half. What’s more, the fakes in question aren’t the cheap knockoffs that line New York’s Canal Street or flea markets in Paris. The real issue is what the industry calls superfakes—copies that are nearly indistinguishable from the originals, making the efforts of the likes of Mélissa and her colleagues all the more challenging.
Seized Counterfeit and Pirated Goods
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development says counterfeiting goods is a $467 billion industry worldwide, with a significant portion of those products finding their way stateside. Last year, US Customs and Border Protection confiscated fake luxury items with a street value of $4.2 billion—mostly jewelry, watches, handbags and wallets. “That’s only the amount that was seized—the tip of the iceberg,” says Laurent Dhennequin, director of the Comité Colbert, a venerable trade group in Paris. His workload, he laments, has become “nonstop counterfeit.”
Top brands such as Chanel, Hermès and Louis Vuitton have long resisted the secondhand market, fearing it would undermine demand for new goods and tarnish their tightly managed image of exclusivity—yet their goods are among the biggest sellers on Vestiaire and the RealReal. And lately, some luxury houses have started to embrace resale, however grudgingly. In 2021, Vestiaire began partnerships with five companies, including Alexander McQueen and Mulberry. That same year, Kering SA, the group behind Gucci, Saint Laurent and about a dozen other brands, spent €178 million ($203 million) for 5% of the reseller. “Preowned luxury is now a real and deeply rooted trend,” Kering’s chairman and chief executive officer, François-Henri Pinault, said at the time.
One problem, though, is that there’s no global standard for authentication. And trademark holders do retain some control, forcing resellers to carefully calibrate their marketing language, says Susan Scafidi, director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham University in New York. “Luxury resale companies tend to tout their authentication processes or refer to goods as ‘authenticated’ rather than simply calling them ‘authentic,’” Scafidi says. “Their primary claims are about the processes, not the products.”
Reseller StockX, for instance, used to assert the goods it sells were “Verified Authentic.” But now the company—which Nike Inc. accused of trademark infringement, counterfeiting and false advertising in a 2022 lawsuit that’s scheduled to go to trial soon—says its goods are “StockX Verified.” And when the RealReal launched in 2011, it insisted its goods were “100% authentic,” but now its marketing stresses its “authentication standards” and the site’s “authenticity guarantee.”
Semantics aside, the best legal defence for resellers is simply doing their utmost to avoid fakes. That’s where Vestiaire’s Tourcoing authentication academy comes into play. New hires undergo at least 750 hours of instruction, learning about materials and production, the use of magnification tools and UV lamps, and the latest counterfeiting methods. After at least two months of studying the company’s 12-point authentication program, recruits specialize: shoes, clothing, bags, jewelry or accessories.
Items reach Tourcoing either because a prospective buyer pays a €15 verification fee or because the item is priced above €1,000, which automatically triggers an assessment. And sellers are increasingly listing ultra-high-end luxury goods on the site. Recently, that included a lapis lazuli Cartier watch for €45,000 and an Hermès Himalaya handbag for €125,000—items that might historically have been auctioned at Christie’s or Sotheby’s.
Vestiaire says it works closely with at least a dozen luxury brands, but confidentiality agreements prevent it from revealing the names of the companies. Victoire Boyer Chammard, the head of authentication, says that while cooperation varies from house to house, it ranges from assisting with complex appraisals to leading training courses in Vestiaire’s authentication academy.
In exchange, she can offer an important commodity the luxury manufacturers can’t easily get: really good fakes. While Vestiaire must return to sellers any counterfeits it detects, it gathers data before it dispatches the goods. And more often than not, the sellers fail to take back the fakes they’ve tried to pass off as real, allowing Boyer Chammard to stockpile them for later analysis. “We have data we can share about the evolution of counterfeiting of their brand,” she says.
Vestiaire says that after product submissions surged in 2019, it began to step up use of artificial intelligence, a harbinger of the tech-driven future of authentication. The European Union last year introduced legislation requiring all new textiles, electronics and furniture to contain contain IDs called Digital Product Passports. Chanel replaced its gold-edged, black plastic authenticity cards, which had accompanied its leather goods since 1984, with holograms and microchips embedded in bags that can be scanned to verify authenticity. And the Aura Blockchain Consortium, a nonprofit launched in 2021 by LVMH, Prada Group, Richemont and Italian fashion conglomerate OTB Group, has created standardised digital IDs with a proprietary blockchain. Prada uses it for authenticity cards that accompany its recycled gold jewellery purchases. After scanning the card, customers can verify (and transfer) ownership and access background information on sourcing and craftsmanship.
Whatever the long-term solution, the more pressing question is: Will consumers even care? Prices for luxury goods have jumped an average of 54% since December 2019, according to HSBC Holdings Plc, with some handbags more than doubling in price. This greedflation, as aggrieved consumers call it, along with social media outrage about diminishing quality—crooked stitching, misaligned patterns, gold-toned hardware that tarnishes after a few months—has contributed to the rise of a dupe culture in which fakes have gone from taboo to cool.
A third of US adults say they’ve intentionally bought counterfeits—anything from cheap knock-offs to copies that are almost indistinguishable from the original, according to The Business of Fashion, an industry publication. “The delight we’re seeing these days marks a big shift in attitude,” says Emilia Petrarca, creator of the fashion newsletter Shop Rat. She points to the fanfare around the “Wirkin,” a $78 faux Birkin bag from Walmart Inc. that sold out almost instantly last year. “Fakes,” she says, “have been memeified.”
But if humans struggle to determine whether a bag or dress or shoe is authentic—with or without the help of technology—does it even matter? Luxury houses must justify their stratospheric prices with unassailable quality and desirable heritage, or watch as the once-clear distinction between authentic and counterfeit becomes irrelevant to a generation that values accessibility over exclusivity. For an industry built on image, aspiration and status, the most troubling illusion might not be the authenticity of products themselves but rather the belief that authenticity is worth a premium price.
By Lindsey Tramuta
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