Paris Olympics, France Intensify Clothing Wars To Fake Branded Bags

ILLUSTRATION OF UNSPLASH/Paul MARSAN/Arc de Triomphe, Place Charles de Gaulle, Paris, France/

JAKARTA - In the Saint-Ouen market which is crowded with tourists, not far from the Stade de France where athletes will compete at the Paris Olympics this summer, police officers stormed into on April 3.

Police closed 11 shops selling counterfeit goods from bags and shoes.

They confiscated 63,000 pieces of clothing, shoes, and leather items, including fake Louis Vuitton and Nike, opened the product and immediately threw them into the garbage truck. Ten people were arrested.

Michel Lavaud, head of police security on the outskirts of the city of SEine-Saint-Denis, who will host Paris 2024 athletics and swimming events, described the operation as part of a pre-Olympic crackdown on counterfeit goods.

Fake fashion is a big business. Fake branded clothing alone is thought to cause the loss of average sales of companies in France by 1.7 billion euros (1.83 billion US dollars) annually between 2018 and 2021, according to the EU Intellectual Property Office.

"We've been talking about counterfeiting for the past two years," Lavaud said.

The raids on the world's fashion capital have similarities to the cleaning carried out by previous Olympic hosts such as Beijing in 2008, which gave mixed results, as well as London in 2012 and Rio in 2016.

However, the police crackdown on street vendors in the SEine-Saint-Denis, where one in three people living in poverty according to France's national statistics, has drawn criticism for making people who are already in difficult economic situations increasingly difficult.

Axel Wilmort, a researcher at a French social science institute for the LAVUE urban study, said he had seen a sharp increase in police presence and expression; against informal market sellers on the outskirts of Paris over the past three months.

"There is a desire to remove all signs of vulnerability, poverty and unwanted things," he said, citing law enforcement officials often not distinguishing between fake sellers and sellers of legitimate used goods.