It was early 2021 when, thrown into sensory overload by grisly pandemic headlines, I found my gaze drifting guiltily to an advertisement in the right margin of a news site, where the model Kaia Gerber arched her arms lovingly around a Celine Triomphe - a plain, itty-bitty rectangular prism that in no universe could possibly be worth, as further research informed me, $2,200. lawyers, or “unclockable reps” to their enthusiastic buyers - began a couple of years earlier, in what I might characterize as a spontaneous fit of lunacy. My plunge into the world of fantastically realistic counterfeit purses - known as “superfakes” to vexed fashion houses and I.P. I was toting around a delicious, maddening secret: Like a ship remade with identical wood, the bag on my arm had been built on the same plan, with seemingly the same gleaming materials, as the “original.” Yet it was considered inauthentic, a trick, a cheat. But the bag’s fraudulence was undetectable to human eyes.

In France, a country that prides itself on originating so much of the world’s fashion, punishments for counterfeiting are severe, to the point that I technically risked three years in prison just by carrying my little knockoff around.

Not long ago, I found myself wandering through Paris with a fake Celine handbag slung over my shoulder. What if, Thomas Hobbes wondered, someone rustled up a second boat out of the discarded planks would you now have two original vessels? And what about our own era of machine-made duplication - does replication strip away the soul of creation? Fascinated by this mythical tale, the philosopher Plutarch found it to embody a “logical question of things that grow”: After Theseus’s ship had been stripped of all its original material, could it still be considered the same ship? His question has caromed through centuries of Western thought. The vessel was preserved by Athenian citizens, who continually replaced its rotting planks with strong, fresh timber so a pilgrimage to Delos could be made each year in their hero’s name.

Once upon a time, the legend goes, Theseus slew the Minotaur and sailed triumphantly home to Athens on a wooden ship.

Phantastica by Louis Lewin