In the midday heat of downtown Los Angeles, Chris Johnson squints at the jeans-clad plastic buttocks of mannequins lined up in Fashion District storefronts.
He's looking for something special: a horseshoe design stitched in the jeans' back pockets. He passes stores selling counterfeit Coach bags and Prada sunglasses, then heads down an alley to a store where two men are checking their cellphones and looking bored.
"Have any True Religion, size 6?" he asks. One of the shopkeepers looks around to make sure no one else is nearby, then disappears into a back room. He emerges holding two pairs of women's jeans, complete with the trademarked True Religion horseshoes on the pocket and True Religion tags, picturing a Buddha holding a guitar. Johnson buys one pair -- which usually retails for between $170 and $400 -- for $60.
Back on the street he inspects his purchase more closely. "I can tell just by looking that they're fake," he says. "The stitching is inferior to the real McCoy."
But Johnson isn't disappointed -- in fact, he seems satisfied as he inspects the jeans and points out each flaw. With his bulky, 6-foot-2 frame, mop of curly hair, ruddy cheeks and glasses pinching the tip of his nose, he looks like an overgrown boy who's just won a treasure hunt.
In a sense he has. Johnson is among a growing number of fashion sleuths who covertly buy counterfeit products so that major designers can sue the people who sell them. A specialist in dungarees, Johnson has a client list that includes True Religion Brand Jeans, Joe's Jeans and Antik Denim. He likes to joke that none of those companies makes jeans in his size.
But it's an uphill battle for Johnson and the hundreds of investigators like him as the flow of counterfeit goods into the United States increases. Customs officials seized $197 million worth of fakes in 2007, up 27% from the previous year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Last year, customs officials seized $18 million worth of counterfeit apparel, which includes denim, from China alone -- up 29% from the previous year.
Those numbers represent only a small slice of the counterfeit goods traded every day: According to the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition, the global trade in illegitimate goods has increased from $5.5 billion a year in 1982 to $600 billion today.
