When people discuss counterfeiting in fashion, they usually approach it primarily as a legal/IP issue. Here is a different place to start.
A relative of mine in Mumbai recently found the handbag she had wanted for months. The price was close enough to the brand’s usual range that she did not think twice. The stitching looked right. The dust bag looked right. The tag listed the fibre content, the country of manufacture and a line about responsible sourcing. She believed she was buying a product made by that company, to that company’s standards.
She was not.
What exactly did she buy? Not just a logo. A garment carries dozens of quieter claims: what it is made of, how it was dyed, who assembled it, what chemicals touched it before it touched her skin, what happens to it once she is finished wearing it. She cannot verify most of these claims by looking. Often, neither can the brand whose name sits on the label, because that garment was never inside its supply chain to begin with.
This is the part of counterfeiting we rarely discuss. We often treat it as an intellectual property dispute: a stolen logo, a diverted sale, a legal letter to a marketplace. That framing is not wrong. It is simply too small.
Consumers do not only pay for fabric and thread. They pay for a set of promises: that the product meets a certain quality, that it was sourced and made a certain way, increasingly, that it carries a certain environmental or ethical standard. A counterfeit borrows all of that trust without ever earning it. Clothing, footwear and leather goods together account for 62 percent of all counterfeit goods seized worldwide, the most targeted category in global trade. In the United States alone, Customs and Border Protection seized nearly USD 5 billion in counterfeit luxury, fashion and footwear products in fiscal year 2024 and while CBP hasnot yet published a comparable 2025 figure specifically for these categories, its total counterfeit seizures surged to more than $7.3 billion in FY2025.
The label on a counterfeit garment may say one thing. The garment itself may be something else entirely. A study released by the American Apparel and Footwear Association and Intertek in early 2026 tested 39 counterfeit items across apparel, footwear and accessories, mostly bought through social media and online marketplaces. Sixteen of them, 41 percent, failed US and international safety standards. One item carried a plasticiser chemical at more than 650 times the permitted limit. Others contained PFAS, lead, cadmium and formaldehyde well beyond restricted thresholds, substances with documented effects on children’s health and development. The problem is not only that the product is fake. It is that every claim attached to it becomes impossible to trust. That makes counterfeiting a product integrity problem long before it becomes a legal one.
The garment does not vanish once it is purchased. It may be resold, donated, collected, or eventually sorted for recycling. Every one of these processes depends on trustworthy information about what a garment actually contains. A counterfeit sits outside that entire system while still carrying the brand’s identity. As fashion moves toward take-back programmes, resale platforms and circularity, the gap between the products a brand can verify and those circulating under its name becomes a traceability liability, not just a legal one
The same problem follows sustainability claims into the open. Counterfeiters do not only copy logos. They increasingly copy the language and imagery of responsible sourcing, recycled content and certification, because that language now sells. A garment that never touched a brand’s supply chain can still carry its sustainability story. This does not automatically amount to greenwashing on the brand’s part. It does create consumer confusion, and it puts pressure on brands to show, with evidence, which claims apply to which products. In the European Union, the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, binding from September 2026, already tightens what environmental claims companies are permitted to make. A brand that cannot distinguish its own products from counterfeit ones is defending its sustainability record with one hand behind its back.
This is where counterfeiting starts to affect more than intellectual property. It starts to affect the ESG claims brands are expected to stand behind. On the environmental side, unverified material composition and undocumented chemical use undercut recycling and lifecycle claims. On the social side, unauthorised manufacturing sits entirely outside a brand’s oversight of labour standards, though it would be wrong to assume every counterfeit implies exploitation without evidence. Governance is where the real test sits: can a brand confidently separate the products it controls from the products merely carrying its name? Anti-counterfeiting is not, by itself, an ESG requirement. It is fast becoming a precondition for proving the rest of the ESG story at all, as auditors and regulators increasingly expect brands to substantiate claims about sourcing, material composition and traceability.
None of this is theoretical. In late 2023, US federal prosecutors announced the largest counterfeit goods seizure in American history: roughly 219,000 fake bags, shoes and garments carrying the names of Louis Vuitton, Dior, Gucci, Burberry and Hermes, seized from a Manhattan storage facility with an estimated retail value above one billion dollars. On the other side of the same problem, LVMH, Prada Group and Cartier founded the Aura Blockchain Consortium in 2021 to give luxury products a verifiable digital identity. By late 2024 the consortium had registered more than 50 million products, with brands including Jil Sander, Maison Margiela and Marni adding digital certificates of authenticity to their collections. One story shows the scale of the exposure. The other shows what a serious response looks like.
India offers its own version of the same warning. A 2025 FICCI CASCADE study estimated India’s illicit market across five key sectors, including textiles and apparel, at nearly Rs 7.97 lakh crore, with textiles and apparel accounting for over half of that value.
But many of these rely on two dimensional or visually reproducible features that can be cloned or replicated to a degree that makes them difficult for consumers to distinguish from the original. A copied QR code can look identical to the genuine one, while a sophisticated counterfeit hologram can be reproduced closely enough to appear authentic. These features can therefore give consumers a false sense of security without proving that the physical product itself is genuine. The more durable question is whether the product itself can carry a unique, verifiable identity that is difficult to clone and remains tied to the physical product. That is a different kind of investment than a legal budget line. It sits closer to the traceability, sustainability and product data systems brands are already building.
My relative in Mumbai did not set out to buy a fake. Counterfeit supply chains have been associated with issues ranging from child labour and worker exploitation to unsafe working conditions and environmental harm, precisely because they operate beyond the oversight and accountability expected of legitimate brands. That makes counterfeiting more than a threat to sales or intellectual property. It can disconnect consumers like my relative from the ethical and sustainability commitments they believe their purchase supports.
Protecting authenticity, at scale, is therefore also about protecting the credibility of everything a brand claims to stand for. Brands investing in sustainability, circularity and responsible supply chains also need to know whether the products carrying their name actually came from those systems. A brand cannot fully own its sustainability story, its safety record or its customer relationships if it cannot say with confidence which products in the market are genuinely its own.