The creative director of my former company once said: “Real bags are bought for customs to see, fake bags are carried for colleagues to see.”
Last year, during a team building on a yacht, her matte crocodile-pattern Kelly bag was blown into the water by the sea breeze. The hardware that floated up was engraved with “lxybags·ru” inside – it turned out that this girl had locked the real thing in a safe in Zurich, and all she used in her daily life were replicas.
Later, she confessed at the resignation reception: “When you use a fake bag to catch the coffee cup thrown by the CEO at the board meeting, you will understand what “luxury bulletproof vest” means.
Once I was looking at Persian miniatures in the British Museum, and the guide pointed to a 15th-century gilded book cover and said: “The craftsmen deliberately mixed copper into the gold so that the thieves could not melt enough gold nuggets. “
This reminds me of the time-honored kimono belt merchants in Kyoto, who still retain the “aesthetics of flaws” – inserting wrong stitches in the dark patterns to prevent cheap imitations.
Modern people’s anxiety has become performance art: my neighbor’s wife rotates seven different brands of replica bags every week, claiming that this is a “guerrilla tactic against big data profiling.”