A Counterfeit Brand Quandary

With a swish of fabric, Courtney Love entered the party.

Not just any party – the 26th anniversary of Paris Hilton. Accompanied by her daughter Frances, by most guests’ estimation, she looked fabulous in a black mini-dress with white fringed applique and matching fingerless gloves. Photographs were taken, Champagne flowed, celebrities danced, and a good time was had by all.

A few days later at the exclusive Paris headquarters of uber-secretive luxury house Chanel, the phone was ringing. It was one of Chanel’s most prized clients, and she was not happy. The woman was one of the 150 women who buy couture from Chanel. This lady was not the usual Chanel buyer who is happy to pay a meagre £2000 for an outfit, however – oh no. This was a real luxury client who had attended the semi-annual fashion shows of Chanel’s chief designer Karl Lagerfeld and selected from the runway a unique dress that would later be designed and produced exclusively for her.

Yet the usually demure client was furious: she had seen the dress she had only just selected from the runway in Paris being worn by some random (and entirely inappropriate) US celebrity. Having been promised a one-off piece of French fashion, the client was cancelling her six-figure order. The scandal that Harper’s Bazaar later christened ‘L’Incident de Chanel’ had begun.

Love, it later transpired, had been wearing a copy of the Chanel couture dress. Where Lagerfeld’s original was made from eagle feathers, hers was made from marabou. Thanks to the time delay between runway show and delivery of the dress to a couture client, Ms Love had trumped the fashion world with a knock-off.

Once alerted to her error, Love immediately contacted Chanel. ‘I wrote Mr Lagerfeld a letter, an in-depth apology,’ she explained. ‘I offered to pay for the dress, throw him a party, do whatever I needed to do to make up for this horrific thing.’

At this stage, Chanel faced a bit of a quandary. On the one hand, there is nothing more annoying than the fakes that plague the luxury industry. On the other, however, Love is a celebrity, and it never pays to upset them – especially when they are potentially able to start a new fashion movement with even the most accidental of fashion choices.

Somewhere deep in the heart of Paris, the luxury masters whispered to each other: ‘What if copies became cool? What if the next big thing was to wear a fake? Better to get Ms Love back into the fold ASAP and erase this embarrassing incident.’

So Mr. Lagerfeld was at his most polite when he replied to Love’s apology. ‘Poor girl, she had never seen a real couture dress. Someone made her believe it was the real thing. It’s not her fault; it’s the fault of a horrible stylist!’ And the two began to talk. Then we saw the results of their new-found friendship. Love appeared naked across two pages of Harper’s Bazaar, reclining in Madame Chanel’s original apartment wearing nothing except a scowl, a camellia flower (Coco’s favorite) and Chanel jewellery. The headline said it all: ‘I’d rather go naked than wear fake Chanel’.

There is no way Love would have been courted by the fashion house had she gone to Paris’ party in the real thing. This is, of course, how all great fashion brands work. They co-opt the angry and the independent, and absorb their styles into their own. Fashion looks for anti-fashion. Luxury looks for the mundane. And consumer culture moves forward.

Love is now fully re-instated in the genuine world of luxury. She comments: ‘In a way, it’s insanely subversive, because I don’t think anyone has done fake couture before. But honest to God, I did not know. I hope it was burned.’ She’s either the dumbest celebrity in Hollywood, or the smartest. Or perhaps you can be both at the same time.

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