Play Azur Festival: customs seize nearly 1,600 counterfeit items at Nice's Palais des Expositions

Figurines, soft toys, posters: customs officers inspected the stands at the 9th edition of the pop culture fair. Its founder, Bastien Vergoni, points out that selling counterfeits means exclusion from the festival.

Amid the cosplayers and video game fans, around fifteen customs officers combed through the stands. At the 9th edition of the Play Azur Festival on Saturday at the Palais des Expositions in Nice, Alpes-Maritimes customs seized nearly 1,600 counterfeit items, mainly soft toys, figurines and posters, France 3 Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur reported.

More than 100,000 items were on sale across some 120 stands, festival director Bastien Vergoni said. Customs attend every year, and exhibitors undertake by contract not to sell counterfeit goods, on pain of exclusion, he told Nice-Matin.

The festival, which covers 14,000 m² and four stages, was expecting more than 25,000 visitors over the weekend of 25 and 26 April. In its early days it billed itself as the gathering for the French Riviera's online video creators: the February 2017 edition hosted around fifty YouTubers. It has since broadened to the whole of pop culture, from video games to cosplay.

Behind the event is a Nice association, Play Azur, founded in 2016 by Bastien Vergoni, who chairs it. His is an unusual background for a trade fair organiser: he holds a doctorate in biology, with a thesis on obesity defended in 2017 at Université Côte d'Azur. The 10th edition has already been announced for April 2027.