ABSTRACT
Corso Buenos Aires, Milan’s high street. From Piazzale Loreto in the northeast and its nameless stores of cheap Chinese-made, unbranded clothes, the road runs southwest past global clothing stores like Benetton, Zara, and H&M. Further south, the street changes name as it bends towards the centre, gathering together the elite brands in the ‘Made in Italy’ stable: Prada, Armani, and Versace. On weekdays in the afternoon and early evenings and throughout the weekend, the footpaths that run past the shops are almost impassable, filled with people window shopping. At these times, the street edge of this footpath was once the site of a second informal, precarious, and unauthorized geography of commerce. Shadowing the shops that line the footpath, groups of Senegalese men sold counterfeit luxury goods from the small white sheets that they carefully spread on the ground in the periods between the increasingly frequent patrols of police. These men were the visible nodes in a shadow economy that made luxury brands available for everyday middle-class consumption.
