Fashion with substance

       
    Fulfilling one of my college goals, I studied abroad last semester, and spent almost every weekend walking ancient cobblestone streets in many different historic and gorgeous cities of Europe.
    Though I floated around in a giddy daze, surrounded by masterful architecture and incomprehensible languages, I noticed a trend, one which kept bringing me back to the 21st century.
    From Rome to Dublin, Amsterdam to Prague, I was bombarded by street vendors with knockoff and counterfeit merchandise.
    Though my epiphany about the world's intoxication with the fashion industry's gray-market goods transpired in Europe, American soil is no less guilty.
    In fact, we're one of the worst. In 2002, U.S. Customs and Border Protections reported that it had confiscated more than $80 million in counterfeit goods that smugglers had been trying to import.    Though these fake designer bags, sunglasses and even clothes are illegal, many still wonder how this can be such a harmful market. But there are several reasons to avoid purchasing counterfeit items.

    First, when you produce or purchase counterfeits, you are committing a trademark infringement crime, which weakens the market value of products exhibiting the trademark.
    According to the textbook "Going Global: The Textile and Apparel Industry," the U.S. CBP reports that brand owners around the world lose about $720 billion every year because of counterfeit goods.
    It goes on to say that the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, which is based in Washington, D.C., has found that counterfeit goods cost American companies alone more than $200 billion a year.
    As students who are preparing to enter careers in what will most likely be U.S. companies, this is something we need to be aware of, because we inevitably will be the ones making up for this loss of revenue both as employees and consumers.

    Also, backing counterfeit goods doesn't exactly help support Third World countries.
    When you buy a pair of fake Ray Bans on the street corner, you could be financing the abortions a sweatshop owner in China forces his female workers to have so he won't have to put up with them missing work.
    That fake Louis Vuitton purse you bought last summer – it might have paid for a 9-year-old Filipino girl to be chained to a sewing machine for 14 hours a day.
    "Going Global" even suggests that many terrorist groups are turning to counterfeiting for funding. In fact, "sale of counterfeit T-shirts and videos in New York are believed to be part of the funding sources for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and its destruction in 2001."   
    Knowledge is power, so we need to care enough to educate ourselves as consumers.
    I hope you want to learn more about how counterfeit goods affect you, others and businesses and economies throughout the world.