Counterfeiting What?: Aesthetics of Brandedness and BRAND in Tamil Nadu, India

This article investigates the circulation and production of branded apparel consumed by lower and lower-middle class young men in urban Tamil Nadu, India, focusing on garments which exceed the authorized brand: export surplus, duplicates, hybridized branded forms, and fictive branded forms. I argue that the circulation and production of such brand surfeits is governed by the (dis)articulation of global brand logics and local aesthetics of brandedness. The interlinkages between this aesthetics and the logics of export-oriented and local ("counterfeit") production result in the bracketing of brand image and identity, even as particular aspects of the brand are reproduced. The article concludes by critically interrogating the analytics "brand" and "counterfeit" as naturalizations of particular frames of commodity intelligibility. I argue that the coherence of commodity classifications like brand and brandedness is contingent upon the regular regimenting of excesses of brand materiality and intelligibility across moments of production, circulation, and consumption.