Superfake
Lily Cho
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The fake purse resurfaces one of the original anxieties of global capitalism’s ascent: counterfeit currency. From the very beginning of the transition to our modern financial system, one that depends upon increasingly abstract and immaterial forms of currency, there has been an anxiety about fakes from China. Even before the transition to paper currency, there was concern that Chinese merchants traded with silver that was impure. In the twenty-first century, the rise of the “superfake” has gripped the luxury industry. These counterfeits are so good that they are not only indistinguishable from the authentic item, they are also essentially the same object, made from leathers sourced from the same tanneries as the luxury houses and crafted by workers with skills that match, stitch for stitch, those in luxury ateliers.(1) The trade wars that unfolded in the early part of 2025 have only accelerated the intensity and pace of these claims. On social media, young Chinese factory workers speak crisp English and show off immaculate products with immediately recognizably logos that they claim are manufactured right behind them, far from the European capitals from which these luxury labels declare provenance.(2) In these videos, the factory worker exhorts consumer to buy directly from them. The superfake cuts to the vulnerable heart of global capitalism’s elaborate trust exercise. Trust us, these things which represent other things – whether that is a hundred-dollar bill or a twelve-thousand-dollar purse – is what we say it is and its value will stay true.
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Barbara Segal, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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Our daily financial lives reveal every day how money has become more and more abstract, more and more immaterial – tap your smartwatch on a plastic box to pay for these groceries, click on your phone to make your mortgage payment – the anxiety of the real becomes more and more a clear and present danger for global capital. You have to believe that the money in your bank account is really there. Even though, if you stop to think about it for even a moment, it’s obviously not. It’s out there, circulating, floating a complex trust ledger exercise of loans, hedges, and bonds that is the financial market. Bank runs – those events where people suddenly want their money to become real by withdrawing it out of the bank – are terrifying because they make real the fiction of finance that holds the global economic order in place. If we all wanted our money as money, in our hands and under our mattresses, the global economic order would collapse.
Superfakes are not going to cause a bank run, but their existence says out loud what readers already know: that finance is a fiction and that the assignation of value, whether to a piece of paper or to a purse, is an arbitrary exercise not at all grounded in real value. In Counterfeit, Kirstin Chen’s novel about a brilliant con involving counterfeit purses, Winnie asks Ava, “what makes a fake bag fake if it’s indistinguishable from the real thing? What gives the real bag its inherent value?”(3) Winnie’s question opens up the problem of global capitalism’s trust exercise, which in this case is also a part of what Marx called commodity fetishism. There is almost no relationship between the exchange value of the real or the fake purse and its inherent value. Describing the superfake Chanel bag that is Ava’s entry into the con, a model called the Gabrielle, Ava tells the detective, “I had to admit she had a point: the real and knockoff Gabrielles were exact duplicates, from the brushed antique-gold logos to the gilded authenticity cards in their crisp letterpress envelopes.”(4) The superfake, this consumer object which is not only indistinguishable from the real but is in some ways more real than the real, uncovers the real con of luxury commerce: that its value is an elaborate fiction. The exchange value of the object is grossly misaligned with the cost of its production that its purported value. The superfakes simply make real what the consumer already knows. That there is no difference between the fake and real, that we as participants in global capital are always already being duped.
Superfakes are not going to cause a bank run, but their existence says out loud what readers already know: that finance is a fiction and that the assignation of value, whether to a piece of paper or to a purse, is an arbitrary exercise not at all grounded in real value. In Counterfeit, Kirstin Chen’s novel about a brilliant con involving counterfeit purses, Winnie asks Ava, “what makes a fake bag fake if it’s indistinguishable from the real thing? What gives the real bag its inherent value?”(3) Winnie’s question opens up the problem of global capitalism’s trust exercise, which in this case is also a part of what Marx called commodity fetishism. There is almost no relationship between the exchange value of the real or the fake purse and its inherent value. Describing the superfake Chanel bag that is Ava’s entry into the con, a model called the Gabrielle, Ava tells the detective, “I had to admit she had a point: the real and knockoff Gabrielles were exact duplicates, from the brushed antique-gold logos to the gilded authenticity cards in their crisp letterpress envelopes.”(4) The superfake, this consumer object which is not only indistinguishable from the real but is in some ways more real than the real, uncovers the real con of luxury commerce: that its value is an elaborate fiction. The exchange value of the object is grossly misaligned with the cost of its production that its purported value. The superfakes simply make real what the consumer already knows. That there is no difference between the fake and real, that we as participants in global capital are always already being duped.
(1) Wang, Amy X. “Inside the Delirious Rise of ‘Superfake’ Handbag.” The New York Times Magazine, May 4, 2023.
(2) Li, Ang, “Chinese Manufactures Make Appeals to Americans: Buy Direct,” The New York Times, April 24, 2025.
(3) Chen, Kirstin. Counterfeit. New York: HarperCollins, 127.
(4) Ibid.
(2) Li, Ang, “Chinese Manufactures Make Appeals to Americans: Buy Direct,” The New York Times, April 24, 2025.
(3) Chen, Kirstin. Counterfeit. New York: HarperCollins, 127.
(4) Ibid.
Lily Cho is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at York University. Her current SSHRC-funded project, Asian Values: Fictions of Finance and Beautiful Money, explores diasporic movement and theories of value in postcolonial Asia. Her book, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens, was also supported by SSHRC. This book won an Honourable Mention from the Photography Network’s 2022 Book Prize and won the Association for Asian American Studies’ 2023 prize for Outstanding Achievement in the Multidisciplinary Category.
