What really goes on behind the scenes at a garment factory? Good tours five massive clothing-manufacturing sites in Lima, Peru. (Good)
Your fashion felony may no longer be the subject of hyperbole. Fordham Law School is putting out a shingle for the Fashion Law Institute, a world’s first. (WWD)
The word is out: Carbon-neutral fashion for a hauter—not hotter—planet. (Green By Design)
Conventional cotton farmers are in a tizzy over the “spread of misinformation” about their crops. And some (allegedly) bad math. (Delta Farm Press)
Does eco-fashion need a new name? Julie Gilhart, fashion director of Barneys seems to think so. (TreeHugger)
QUOTABLE QUOTE
“Why does it have to be called eco-chic? Why not just chic?”
—Livia Firth at Esthetica Press Day in London.
I know the comment with respect to “fashion felony” is tongue in cheek but the trend of fashion “lawyering” it foretells is quite troubling. It’s but a harbinger of what is to come, namely the death of independent designers if people like Diane Von Furstenberg get their way.
It’s a long story but DVF and CFDA (buddy buddy with Susan Scafidi of Fordham) are the impetus behind a proposed law called the DPPA or Design Piracy Prohibition Act. On the face of it, it looks awesome, just the perfect thing to protect the design ideas of budding new designers. Right? Wrong. To be protected, one will have to spend thousands of dollars on fashion legal fees to register their designs. If you don’t do it, you face two huge problems.
First, if this law passes and you don’t register your designs, *anyone* can apply to register your designs, meaning they will own them, not you. You can get sued for producing your own styles. Second, because anyone in your supply chain can also be sued for helping you with styles registered by someone else, no contractor is going to take your sewing jobs because they don’t want to get sued. And then, you won’t have a place to sell anything either. Retailers won’t buy your stuff because they don’t want to be arrested for piracy. Yes, arrested.
We already have laws that aren’t being enforced now. The first strategy should be to implement those.
Consumers will lose because the only designers who can afford to register are huge brands and wealthy socialite designers like Diane Von Furstenberg. This means consumers will have to spend the big bucks on clothing -this is an opportunity a monopolist can only dream of. And we all know that big ticket designers only cut small sizes. Good luck finding something in your size at a price you can pay and that’s in addition to hoping you’ll find a style and color that doesn’t insult your integrity and decency.
It’s one thing if innovators make the autonomous decision to spend the hefty cash to formalize protections of their intellectual capital (btw, nearly all never launch because they blew their wad on IP) versus REQUIRING new designers to do it. In sum, this proposed DPPA law written by Scafidi at Fordham is an extremely dangerous precedent.
Thanks for the insight, Kathleen. We’d love to have you write an “Ask a Designer” column on this, especially as it relates to sustainable fashion.