Q: In your book “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre” you peel away the veneer on the luxury fashion industry. Having been immersed in the fashion industry yourself for many years, was this book bourn of a personal sense of disillusionment? What should the consumer take home as the key message?

I wrote the book for two reasons: as a reporter I was witnessing immense financial growth in the luxury sector--businesses were exploding and their shareholders growing extremely rich--while as a consumer, I saw the quality of goods dropping as prices rose. I decided to use my reporter's skills to find out what was going on from a consumer standpoint. From that standpoint, the message would be: you aren't always getting what you think you pay for.

But the most important message of the book--the one I really want to readers to take away--is to never ever knowingly buy counterfeit goods. Counterfeit goods are produced and sold by nefarious crime syndicates who also deal in weapons, drugs, human trafficking, child labour and terrorism. Buying a fake luxury brand handbag is not a victimless crime--not at all.

Q: You personally witnessed the seedy and horrific underbelly of the counterfeiting industry in Guangzhou. There are many people out there who believe that counterfeiting is a victimless crime. What should be done to change their minds?

I think the best way to change peoples' views on buying counterfeit goods is through awareness--explaining all the evils associated with it--which is why I devote an entire chapter on the subject as well as write an annual story for Harper's Bazaar and speak regularly on the subject.

Q: China is the largest production centre of fake products in the world. What was your opinion of the Chinese authorities and their methods for getting to grips with both the counterfeiting problem and the resulting humanitarian problem?

China is an immense country that is growing at about the speed of light, so it has more difficulties in more areas than we could ever imagine. Some authorities have tried to tackle the problem of counterfeit production and sales. But the best way to fight it is by stopping the demand. There would be no production if there were no demand--counterfeiters, after all are entrepreneurs. So we must look to ourselves to stop it by not knowingly buying fake goods.

Q: Luxury brand advertising has great impact; and as you point out, in recent years their methods and the target audience have changed. Is the fashion industry itself partly to blame for the counterfeiting industry thriving so well? Do you believe that the fashion industry tolerates fakes because it actually augments their campaigns?

The fashion industry in general does not tolerate the fakes business--most brands have someone on staff as well as teams of freelance investigators to combat the problem. However, while counterfeiting has been around since the dawn of time, the industry as a whole did inflame the problem when brands switched the focus of their advertising from what the goods are to what they represent, meaning spotlighting and glorifying logos. Today we don't buy luxury goods for what they are, we buy them for the logos--and logos actually have no value, they are simply a mark which anyone can easily reproduce, as the counterfeiters have proven.

Q : Your book told the story up until about 2007. In the last year, the luxury fashion industry is coming to terms with a global recession. What impact do you think this will have, how will the luxury fashion industry change over the next decade and how will this impact the problem of counterfeiting in this industry?

If I could comfortably and reliably predict the future, then I would have cashed in already! What I can say is that the luxury business will continue to retract in countries where the recession has hit hard--such as the US and across Europe--while continuing to grow where the economy is stable or still growing, such as China or South Korea. Brands will keep expanding in emerging markets because there is room to grow. And I suspect eventually that globally the luxury industry will bounce back when the economy does. Humans have indulged in luxuries for thousands of years, they aren’t about to stop now. 

Dana Thomas has been the cultural and fashion writer for Newsweek in Paris for twelve years. She has written about style for The New York Times Magazine since 1994, and has contributed to various publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, The Los Angeles Times, and the Financial Times in London. She is the Paris correspondent for Australian Harper's Bazaar and a member of the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris and the Overseas Press Club. Thomas taught journalism at The American University of Paris from 1996 to 1999. In 1987, she received the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation Scholarship and the Ellis Haller Award for Outstanding Achievement in Journalism. She lives in Paris with her husband and their six-year-old daughter.

Read more about Dana on her website www.danathomas.com

Watch Dana Thomas talk about her book and her experiences of child labour in the counterfeit industry.