This morning, at the Cure market in Florence, while doing my shopping, I saw a young girl carrying a Louis Vuitton bag. A fake, obviously, with a garish monogram, recognisable from a mile off. But it wasn’t a copy of any real bag. I looked closely: that model, that shape, those proportions, as far as I know, don’t exist in any Vuitton catalogue. It wasn’t the imitation of an object. It was the imitation of the idea of an object.

And it’s precisely this detail that makes the whole thing interesting, more than any well made fake. Jean Baudrillard foresaw it better than anyone: certain signs reach a point where they no longer bear any relation to reality. They don’t copy an original imperfectly. They copy nothing, because an original, quite simply, is no longer needed. That bag isn’t pretending to be a real Vuitton. It only pretends to be recognisable as a Vuitton, and that is enough for it.

There is a precise economic reason behind this choice. The economists Gene Grossman and Carl Shapiro explained it as early as 1988: whoever produces a fake status good has no interest in reproducing the real quality of the object. It is enough to reproduce the visible signal, the one a passer-by picks up in a tenth of a second. Nobody feels the leather from three metres away. Everybody sees the monogram.

A 2010 study by Young Jee Han, Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèze puts this world in order with a taxonomy I find perfect. Those with plenty of money and little need to prove it buy quiet luxury, with no conspicuous logos, recognisable only to those who already belong to the same world. Those with plenty of money and a great need to let people know it buy the big logo, to signal to everyone outside their circle that they are not part of it. And then there is a third group, which the authors call, without much ceremony, the poseurs: people who have little and still want to look like people who have a lot, and who buy the loudest fake possible, precisely because the logo is enormous.

That is why it is almost only loud luxury that gets counterfeited. A fake of quiet luxury would not give its buyer what they are looking for: recognition from others. Someone who knows nothing wouldn’t notice it, and someone who knows the field would expose it at once. The fake only works where the signal is big and can be read from a distance. And that is exactly the monogram I saw this morning.

Thorstein Veblen, over a century ago, had already given all this its name: conspicuous consumption. The value of a good, he wrote in 1899, lies not in what it does for you but in the reputation it earns you in the eyes of others. And anyone unable to show it, he added, is perceived as inferior. It isn’t a cruel observation. It is an honest description of a mechanism that back then involved neighbours and colleagues, and today involves an enormously larger audience.

Because that is what has changed since Veblen’s day: the size of the audience. The signal, once, had to convince a few dozen people. Today, with a phone in your hand, the potential audience is anyone, always, everywhere. The most recent research on young people and counterfeit goods confirms that social pressure, from peers and from social media, is among the factors that most push people to buy a fake, and that the more shared the context, the easier it becomes to give yourself moral permission to do it: after all, you can tell it’s fake, but it has the same effect.

In the watch post I asked a question: would you buy a beautiful object if no one in the world could ever see it? Here the question is the opposite, and more uncomfortable: would you buy, or give as a gift, something that never existed, just to be seen? Nobody ever put that question to the girl at the Cure market. The monogram, after all, didn’t even need a real bag to work.