1 - When the Copies Become Better: Seduction of Gāofǎng Fashion in China

Existing scholarship on product authenticity has challenged the IPR law standards, emphasizing that global South consumers are often more concerned about a product’s local prestige, material quality and reliability as well as their active (re)appropriation of authenticity. These products’ counterfeit status, however, is considered as less important or irrelevant. 

Effectively complicating the clear distinctions between “authentic” and “fake”, I argue, a symbolic hierarchy of “authorized, legitimate, and authentic” Western products versus their “unauthorized, illegitimate” yet locally perceived “authentic” copies still exists across many “Southern” contexts. The copies still occupy an inferior status and are never perceived as symbolically or materially better. When Global South consumers choose between the originals and the good-quality counterfeits, what do they choose? 

In my recent ethnographic study, I stumbled into a subversive category of Chinese counterfeit luxury fashion catering for both domestic and international consumers: gāofǎng (literally translated as “high-quality replica”). Gāofǎng gains its prestige online

and within exclusive social circles not only by its excellent material quality approximating the original, but its potentially superior quality to the original. What does it entail when a replica can be better than an original? In what ways does it contest the moral high ground of the original for its promise of offering the highest material quality, irreplicable design, symbolic and aesthetic values, and absolute “realness”? If gāofǎng can transgress the symbolic hierarchy of Western authentic goods, what do authenticity, realness, and originality mean to fashion consumers?  Above all, is gāofǎng fashion emancipatory at all?