Design Theft · Eco-Chick

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Crimes of Fashion

Original Article from Ethical Style

Last Valentine’s Day, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Rayburn office building was the venue for an unusual hearing. Famous designers, fashion executives, and well-styled attorneys talked among themselves while waiting for legislators to return from a vote. Someone described the room as “a strange cocktail party without drinks.”

Capitol Hill isn’t known as a place for fashion-related affairs. Slowly but surely, though, times have changed. Once considered too frivolous a problem for the United States Congress, fashion design theft has finally been brought to the table in the form of the Design Piracy Prohibition Act, or DPPA.

The intellectual property issue has been a pressing one in the fashion industry for many years. However, the lack of legal rights for designers has left them to rely on their own means — and the minimal protection of trademark and patent law — to defend their work against fashion copycats.

Many garment vendors and journalists have credited these loose laws with continued creative innovation and the success of the American mass market. Some have even theorized that the nature of fashion and trends is inconsistent with the notion of a truly “original” clothing design. As one uncompromising San Francisco Chronicle editorial put it, “Is it really realistic to believe that there are really, truly, no designs being invented now that haven’t been created before?”

The answer is a resounding “yes” if you ask ready-to-wear designers Diane Von Furstenberg, Nicole Miller, Zac Posen, and Narciso Rodriguez. They, with a gaggle of other industry supporters, have been pushing hard for the DPPA through the Council of Fashion Designers of American (CFDA), a trade association.