Eric Siu breaks down why wealthy Manhattan women buy counterfeit designer bags. Self-made rich people see no reason to pay full price when a fake achieves the same status signal. It's a way of gaming the system and rejecting traditional luxury hierarchies.
Why do rich people like buying fake bags? So this came out of a piece, I believe, in The New Yorker. It was basically this exposé about how these women on the Upper East and Upper West Side of Manhattan, you know, one of the most expensive zip codes in the country, were going and buying high-end fakes. And those are 3 words you would never think would be in the same sentence, because high-end and fake usually are a clash. But as it turns out, a lot of these women who are self-made, who make Millions of dollars every year, who have supported themselves, built that nest egg on their own. They're saying, "Why do I need the real thing? I got it like that. People think it's the real thing, and if I'm buying a really, really well-made fake, nobody knows the difference. So what's the point? Why should I spend $25,000 on a bag when I can spend $1,000 on the bag, have the exact same result?" And it almost to them felt like cheating the system of like the mean girl scene of like, "You can't sit with us."
