Don’t Congressmen have better things to do? William Delahunt (D-MA) has reintroduced legislation called the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (H.R. 2196), which extends copyright protection to fashion designs in clothing and accessories. There are several problems with this piece of legislation:
(1) It takes time and money to register a design and to go after infringers. So although proponents claim it will protect young designers from having their designs poached by large fashion companies, in reality, it won’t. Young designers don’t have enough money to keep registering their designs or prosecuting infringers. They will also have to clear their designs first with copyright lawyers. Imagine that – lawyers getting into fashion design!
What this law will do, if passed, is to allow large well-known designer brands that have big legal departments and lots of money to terrorize young designers. Although proponents claim that this will prevent people from copying, the truth is that well-known brands such as Louis Vuitton already go after counterfeiters, not just in the US but around the world. Why then do we need this law?
(2) The Congressman who sponsored this bill has no idea whatsoever that fashion designers have been copying since the beginning of time. Nothing is original. Those Vionnet gowns from the 1920s that look like Greek dresses?
Now take a look at the clothes sold in any year. In one season, designers are channeling the 1950s so you see dresses that look like Christian Dior’s postwar New Look. Next season, they’re into the French-Deauville look (that means they are “inspired” by Chanel). Another year they’re channeling the late 1960s and making safari jackets which Yves Saint Laurent “pioneered” (of course, he copied it from the real safari jacket which men wore decades before). This year, the designers are in a 1980s mood and that means they’ve raided the old lookbooks of Thierry Mugler.
The fashion industry would DIE if this law were passed. We’ll end up dressed in flour sacks, but I’m sure someone will copyright that design and then we’ll just have to walk around naked (now the thought of that should terrorize Congress into killing this bill).
(3) When designers “copy”, they don’t do an exact replica. They add their own ingenuity and update the look for the current season. The proposed law just adds to the immense backlog of silly lawsuits in the United States because courts will have to get into the insane business of figuring out whether someone’s design is an “infringement” or if it is original.
I am hoping someone or something kills this stupid bill once and for all and whoever keeps reintroducing this needs to devote his time to more intelligent pursuits. By the way, if this piece of legislative junk had been around in the 1950s, it would have prevented American designers from “copying” the French. Where would the US fashion industry be today?
I like designer clothes. I admire (and pay for) beautifully designed clothing, shoes and accessories, sometimes full price. I don’t just look at the design. I look into what makes a dress or an accessory a wonderful thing to have. If it’s a dress, the fabric is very important, the way it looks and feels and drapes around the body. If it’s a shoe or a bag, the quality of the leather is as important as the design.
Certain fashion brands like Max Mara stand for the quality of their coats. The women who buy these coats will not run to another company making a cheap knock-off because they know that the quality of the wool, the finish, the seams will not be the same. Likewise, if Louis Vuitton makes an expensive handbag covered with screaming logos, I won’t buy it and it doesn’t matter to me if someone makes a cheap knock-off.
I’ve seen knock-offs of designer clothing in Zara, H&M, TopShop and other cheap-and-cheerful clothing chains. I don’t buy them because the clothes fall apart after a few washings, the fit is awful, the fabric is sub-standard. But that’s what you get when you buy cheap, and I understand that people on budgets have to shop there sometimes. But there are those who appreciate and look for quality and they will continue to buy designer clothes even if it means only buying one piece every year. This legislation does nothing to change existing behavior. It won’t make people who are on a budget flock to Dior and it won’t make Dior fans buy more Dior.
The reality: you cannot copy any piece of clothing perfectly because that would require you to use the same fabric, the same buttons, the same thread and to stitch them together in exactly the same way. Even when Madeleine Vionnet “copied” Greek dresses, she added her own genius to them. She also invented the bias cut. Yves Saint Laurent “copied” the safari jacket from men who hunted game in Africa, but he added his own twist and made them sexy. Fashion retailer Zara, which makes cheap versions of runway favorites, does not make exact copies. They do a cheap version of the designer original because that’s their business model. But by then, it’s not an exact replica anymore and they’re not passing it off as the original dress.
Read more here: Legislation to extend copyright protection to fashion designs reintroduced in Congress.
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