Design Piracy Prohibition Act Benefits Big Name Designers… Who All Rip Off Vintage Anyway
It sounds like a good idea - protect the uber creative cutting edge independent clothing designers from the the big bad corporate mass fashion retailers who steal their business when they rip off their ideas and sell mass produced cheap imitations. Too bad it won’t work that way. Mark my words, if the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (DPPA) makes it through the Senate, it will be multimillion dollar large corporate interests who back the big name designers who can afford teams of lawyers that receive ‘protection’, not the struggling independents who can barely afford their rent.
From Addovere.com: (Left: Marc Jacobs, Right: Forever 21, via Fashionista)
But look at the example above - isn’t it painfully obvious that Forever 21 copied the Marc Jacobs dress exactly? Isn’t that wrong? Well, yes, it is. And believe me, I’m no fan of Forever 21. But doesn’t this dress look like something you’d see - or have seen - in a vintage store? Don’t you think that it’s highly likely that Marc Jacobs (or even more likely, one of his 80+ design staff) copied and tweaked the design of an actual vintage dress? Leveraging vintage clothing for ‘inspiration’ is standard practice in an industry that demands dozens and dozens of ‘new looks’ from designers every few months… who are designing for an audience grown accustomed over the past decade plus to ferreting out vintage clothing because it’s so much cooler than the crap in the mall. Don’t believe me? Just put the Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton documentary in your Netflix queue and watch the practice in action. When I got the chance to visit and interview the premiere vintage supplier in NYC (I won’t cite their name because I didn’t ask for blogging rights at the time) they explained how their top stylist would pull together a set of items from their massive collection, create an inviting display, and would regularly have top name designers (or their staff) walk in the door and say ‘I’ll take it all’ and there it would be, 3 months later, strolling down the runway.
Marc Jacobs may have risen to fame and fortune based on his genius ability to co-opt, tweak and disribute an indie aesthetic to hipster celebutantes around the globe, but anyone who designs for Louis Vuitton can hardly be labeled and indie designer. What do the real indie designers - the one this law is supposed to champion and protect - think about the DPPA? Stay tuned as I explore this issue further in my next post.
July 25th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
[...] Design Piracy Protection Act Benefits Big Name Designers… Who All Rip Off Vintage Anyway [...]
July 25th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
I’ve always thought of fashion design as similar to cooking. You can’t copyright a recipe. Change a spice here, a vegetable there any you can take almost the identical recipe and serve it in your restaurant. This happens all the time. It’s nigh impossible to take something as subjective as design and say, this was my idea first. Where would the public domain start? Will indie designers have to bring back fashion inspired by early 19 or late 18th century design because all the stuff from the 40s - 80s that keeps getting recycled is being used by the big designers? (That could be kind of cool, actually.) This is ridiculous and someone should be getting together an organized campaign to let our representatives in Congress know that the people don’t want something like this. Otherwise, it will pass. Organized grassroots resistance is the only thing that has kept herbal medicine from being legislated to the dustbin of history or forced underground. So get busy! Don’t mourn, organize!
July 26th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Hi Tara
We do have an organized campaign comprised of truly independent designers. I’ve been spearheading the protest against this proposed law for nearly 3 years. You can access our petition here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/hr2196/petition.html (yes I’m aware of the misspelling in the title, it was not there before but somehow the petition site owner changed the title when they were moving stuff around, it will be fixed but I cannot do it). Anyway, there’s over 1,000 signatures, we’d have more but the petition site went down *for weeks* right when we were gaining momentum. Btw, do not use this site to host a petition, ever.
Anyway, next week I will be posting more news on the status of what’s going on on my site. You can catch up by sorting entries on my site by the intellectual property category.