Bogus Blues

Which twin is the phony?

A tourist on Mexico City's tree-lined Calle Amberes in the Zona Rosa shopping district might wonder if he is suffering from the mile-high altitude. There at No. 9 is a brand-new Cartier boutique, its windows agleam with shiny gold jewelry, trendy tank watches and glistening leather goods. But only eight doors away, at No. 15-C, is another Cartier, its windows also agleam with shiny gold jewelry, trendy tank watches and glistening leather goods. What is going on? The answer is that No. 15-C is a phony Cartier, and that No. 9 is the real thing, a branch of the Paris house Jeweler Louis-Franc,ois Cartier established in 1847.

The genuine Cartier shop was opened last week to battle the imposter. The fake is the creation of Fernando Pelletier, a Mexican who has 14 "Cartier" boutiques, half of them in the capital, and others in places like Acapulco, Guadalajara and Puebla. They sell such bogus baubles as tank knock-offs assembled with cheap Swiss watch movements. Pelletier once offered to sell his stores to the Paris firm for $4.5 million, but irate Cartier officials decided to pay lawyers instead. The company has won 25 suits against Pelletier, but the copy Cartier remains in business, and still costs the Paris original up to $4 million a year in lost profits.

The fashion world, where imitation used to be the sincerest form of flattery, is also suffering from this kind of larceny, especially since trademarked designer goods have become big business. Laments Jean-Marc Depoix, commercial director for the Christian Dior fashion house in Paris: "This excessively developed taste for the visual signature of the designer has favored the increase of copies. Not only are such well-known logos easy to identify when worn by customers, but they are easy to reproduce by counterfeiters." The French fashion industry alone estimates that it loses roughly $500 million in annual revenues to counterfeiters.

Manufacturers in Japan, once a nation of imitators, complain that others are up to their old tricks. Example: a Hong Kong firm turns out a timepiece under the Aseikon label, so that all a distributor has to do is strip off the a and the n to get a Seiko. In Milan this summer, police raided a warehouse where counterfeiters made copies of goods sold by Dior, Fendi, Cartier, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Valentino, Omega and Celine, among other firms. The inventory included 10,000 gold-plated watches and lighters, 8,500 handbags, 400 pieces of luggage, wallets and purses, 600 belts, 120 assorted boxes and trinkets and more than 1,000 umbrellas.

Dior spends $380,000 a year policing its 313 trademarks and employs a staff of three to work solely on counterfeiting problems. Among other odd missions, they once had to stop a Brooklyn pet shop from marketing Christian Dior T shirts for with-it canines. The Rome-based Gucci chain, which has opened 17 specialty shops in eight countries, has offices in Italy, Britain and the U.S. that deal only with trademark protection. At present, the firm's biggest peeve is a string of five false stores in Argentina; they operate under names like Luigi Gucci and Guglielmo Gucci, and simply reopen with a new first name every time the real Gucci gets a court to order shut them down.

Legitimate marketers hope for some relief from an international anticounter-feiting code that may be ratified in 1981. It calls for greater cooperation to apprehend copiers, as well as stiffer penalties for them. The aim is to make counterfeiting an important trade issue so that, as Alain Thrierr of the French Manufacturers Union says, "government authorities will have to answer for it."

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