The fashion industry, and Mayor Bloomberg, have railed against counterfeit goods for year and years, without giving much thought to how the knock-off business affects the consumers' psyche, focusing instead on how it affects fashion houses' bottom lines. Enter Renee Richardson Gosline, a professor at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, who has spent two-and-a-half years studying the effect of fakes in fashion via a very academic-sounding survey called "Rethinking Brand Contamination: How Consumers Maintain Distinction When Symbolic Boundaries Are Breached." Or, "How Do You Feel Carrying Around a Fake Prada?"

As it turns out, when a lugging around a knock-off Chanel purse from Canal Street, you feel good and bad. "People originally think the counterfeit will be a substitute for the real thing, but they find out the real thing is better," Gosline told WWD, assuring retailers that shoppers who purchase fakes will lose their desire for the fake item, eventuallu. (Although, it should be said that not all in Gosline's field agree. Besides, some people really never stop loving their Gucci cell phone case.)

Apparently the recession and fast fashion economy has inspired counterfeit parties (in place of Tupperware ones) where some shoppers have no qualms about trading and flaunting their fakes. But for some, the stigma surrounding knock-offs will never dissipate. See the counterfeit critics on Facebook, who, sounding a lot more like mean girls, have gone so far as to start a Facebook group called, "Darling I Can Tell by the Rest of Your Outfit Your Louis Vuitton is Fake."