Elena Magdalena Craciun Current Project Elena Magdalena Craciun Curriculum Vitae Current Project FAKE BRANDED CLOTHING: AN EXPLORATION OF ITS "PRESENCE" IN A EUROPEAN PERIPHERY A widespread phenomenon, re-production is morally and legally contested and combated, culturally derided, and socially dismissed as belonging to the lower social strata. I am interested in approaching it in its everyday complexity, by focusing on the lives of objects, and meanings and consequences of their presence; on practices, and preoccupations of people living in the vicinity of these objects. In order to grasp as much as possible of this complexity, I have designed a multi-sided ethnography, choosing as field sites Istanbul (the main regional producer of fakes); "Europa" market on the outskirts of Bucharest (considered the source of 80% of the counterfeited goods on the Romanian market); and Turnu Magurele (a provincial town in south Romania, chosen for its typical clothing-scape, in which "Europa" clothing predominates). These interests have led to me following up many promising trails, but I am far from arranging the pieces of the puzzle. In Turnu Magurele, I have started by scrutinizing the clothing-scape and its sources, establishing the basic conditions of my ethnography; investigating different aspects of people's relationship to clothing, i.e. the formation of a systematic discourse about clothing and social differentiation, budgeting, dreaming, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, wardrobe as financial capital, and respectability.

Within the next site, a huge still expanding commercial area, fakes are a tiny part of the merchandise. Since its opening in the mid 1990s, "Europa" market has become part and parcel of everyday life in Romania, substantially contributing to the local material world. I also paid attention to the ethnic interactions that shape the market experience. This almost illegal site is a battleground on which economic interests of Arabs, Turks, Chinese, Roma and Romanian groups collide. I took into account the way visitors and non-visitors represent it, as "Europa"/Europe to be left behind. I am now exploring the third field site, Istanbul, gathering ethnographic material that allows me to compare the fake brands production and circulation and the genuine brands production and circulation, and, thus, to nuance the way IPR laws clearly divide material world into fakes and originals. Moreover, I am looking at the life trajectories that make people enter the trade, and how the trade shapes their lives. Ironically, the Romanian consumers' reasons for complain about their clothes are the Turkish producers' tricks for making the business more profitable (i.e. fast loosing colours, at one side of the commodity chain; using a lesser quantity of pigments, at the other side). In brief, in all this places, willy-nilly, I try to steal glimpses of the underbelly that supports the visible and the acknowledged. For fake goods are revealing themselves as a means to transport people from one experience to another.