Ooh, may I have some of that Chop Suey Vuitton please?

If you bought a handbag in good conscience for $38 000 (roughly R720 000), you could have a bad case of the Hermes. I don’t care if you’re o-Fendi-d but if you own something as garish, vulgar and crass as a Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Versace at that price there is a good chance you’re a moron.

Chinese manufacturers have recently lifted the lid and claim 80 percent of all luxury handbags, shoes and sneakers, and clothing are made in their factories for much less before they’re marked up by about a million percent for retail in Europe and the United States.

The Chinese say the bags are sent to Europe as finished products before a label, like ‘Made in Italy’, is sewn on to make it authentic. This label, they say, is ultimately the difference between a bag that costs around $2 000 to make but retails for $38 000.

The luxury brands have taken umbrage and deny the claim. But the Chinese manufacturers have taken millions of TikTok viewers behind the scenes. Whether true or not it doesn’t matter because there is enough doubt for consumers to question their life decisions. It’s a scandal that will be tough to recover from – especially because the Chinese are now offering to sell the wares directly to the public at a nano-fraction of the retail cost.

Celebs airheads like the Kardashians are saying never true. But let’s face it: we’ve suspected it all along. And it just took Donald Trump a few weeks to stuff it all up for some of the most valuable brands in the world.

When I visited Istanbul about decade ago on a media jaunt to promote tourism between Turkey and South Africa, we toured a leather manufacturer’s headquarters. The owner told us leather bags for big brands were made at his factory and the hardware and branding were attached in France. Made in France – but just a little

bit. But the Chinese claim they’ve perfected it at scale and at a much lower cost that the brand only needs to stitch on that little label and then sell it for big bucks.

But so what if it was made in China? Detractors will raise questionable labour practices but where are ethical standards for other products that touch every industry – from clothing to construction – that you’re comfortable buying? Stuff that emanates from genocidal apartheid Israel, for example, fill the shelves of many South African stores.

Is a handbag not a functional item to carry your things? Or does it need to be branded and from a certain country because it has an interesting backstory for it to be effective?

If you’re South African and own an original designer handbag that costs the equivalent of two RDP houses, then you’re probably an idiot who deserves to be ripped off.

Americans will make you believe McDonald’s makes the best hamburger in the world. They’ll take it a step further and claim they invented the hamburger. But why stop there? They’ll audaciously claim they invented French fries as well.

It’s like chop suey. It’s an American construct – not a Chinese dish – invented when the country was a frontier colony and cultures collided. A little research shows this Cantonese-inspired US meal was a makeshift because ingredients to make authentic Chinese cuisine weren’t available in the Wild West back then.

Centuries later, can the US go it alone without the help of China in the tech and electronic goods space? I don’t believe Trump can ‘Make America Gucci Again’ because his crew doesn’t know how to scale and mass produce at the cost that Chinese manufacturers can. They have perfected the art.

It is the Brics to the head this US administration will have to take on the chin because of its Commander-in-Chief’s ill-advised hard line on trade tariffs. Trump is not able to make the Prada-digm shift and the US and its allies will be the big loser in the battle of the luxury brands.