This weekend I stopped into the Manhattan Portage store off of Canal Street and after some browsing, the guy behind the counter walked over and started staring at my bag, which astute readers will recall is a Manhattan Portage, shown here in a file photo.
Or so I thought.
“Where’d you get this bag?” he asked.
“The Manhattan Portage store on Elizabeth Street,” I said.
“The Token store?”
“I think that’s what it’s called.”
“It’s a fake,” he said.
He had me look inside for a tiny white “Made in the USA” label that wasn’t there, but that he showed me in a bag he pulled off a nearby hook.
“This is made in China,” he said. “See?” He picked at the red Manhattan Portage logo on the front of the bag. “That’ll come off eventually.” He compared the stitching of the label on my bag to the one he was holding, but they looked the same to me, and I assumed that any looseness in my label was from knocking the bag into walls, doors and assholes in my way on the sidewalk, all natural in the course of a day for a Manhattan commuter.
I don’t know if I believe this guy but he was supremely certain and made me feel like some sort of fake-bag buying jerk.
But his contention is suspicious. The store at which I bought the bag, Token, is listed on the Manhattan Portage website itself (unless that’s a fake) as an authorized reseller. And the bag I bought appears to look the same (at least from the front) and share the description of the bag depicted on the website. And I find it amusing that I had reviewed the “Copies, Counterfeits & Imitations” section on the website (scroll down to bottom of the linked page to view) before I bought the bag. Why would anyone bother to clone such a non-luxury brand, I wondered. Coach, Louis Vuitton or Rolex: you can easily find knockoffs of these for sale any day from the sidewalk on Canal.
But duplicating a Manhattan Portage bag would be like duplicating, I don’t know, a Hanes T-shirt or a can of Del Monte peaches. My Manhattan Portage label doesn’t resemble the obvious knockoffs shown on the website and appears to meet all the other criteria for being the genuine article. And frankly I don’t care if it’s a fake. It’s held up to repeated abuse and its seams haven’t melted away in the rain, so I’m happy with it no matter its lineage. Though until I get some CSI guys on the case, I say it’s real.