Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Fashion police to report for new duty
Luanne Traud
Recent columns
- Marking a difficult anniversary
- My daughter, the voter
- A few new Voices would be nice
- A rush to legislate
From the RoundTable blog
My first foray into the competitive fashion world occurred as a ninth-grader while under mom's orders to clean my room.
I happened upon my forgotten Girl Scout sash with a row of six gold star pins, one earned for each year in scouting.
I snapped the pins off the sash and fastened three each along the pocket edges of my hip-hugging, bell-bottom Landlubber jeans. Within a week, anyone who had ever earned a Girl Scout longevity pin was sporting the look at my junior high. The trend spread to the high school; soon my sophomore neighbor showed up at my house wearing her stars. Aren't they the neatest, she said. So-and-so, a junior, had started the look.
"No, she didn't. She copied," I shot back. "I started it."
To which, the more worldy high-schooler rolled her eyes at the immature absurdity of my protestations.
By then I had worn the stars for two weeks. They looked tarnished, so I went searching for something different to wear with my new hot jeans: straight-legged Levis.
So it is with fashion. Trends are spotted, adopted quickly and discarded just as fast.
The dizzying pace of the high fashion world demands that the top designers stay a season or two ahead of the common folk.
As their designs -- fabric choices, lengths, sleeves, collars, buttons, etc. -- are unveiled on the runways, hits are knocked off down the fashion-food chain as fast as the models change outfits.
Designers score big when Hollywood starlets are captured by the paparazzi looking especially comely in their creations. Everyone wants The Look, until, that is, it becomes the blue-light special at Kmart.
The beauty of the system is that a woman who can afford an $1,800 Dolce & Gabbana suit would die if she were caught at her own funeral dressed in a $200 Jones of New York suit, nor would that woman wear a $50 Jaclyn Smith. Each has its own niche. While a woman might splurge above her regular labels, she knows which departments allow her to stay trendy within her budget.
All that could change, if fashion police crack down on copycats. Rep. Bob Goodlatte has designed a bill to accommodate the Council of American Fashion Designers. It would leave all but the very rich wearing yesteryear's clothes.
Goodlatte plans to extend the umbrella of intellectual property rights to fashion. Designers could file for copyright protection on a garment, and no one would be able to copy the design for three years. Might as well be three decades.
Goodlatte isn't offering the same kind of protection that keeps pirates from selling replica Chloe bags. That is already illegal under trademark laws.
To understand the difference, let's look at jeans.
No manufacturer can stitch the well-known pocket design or affix the red, orange or silver tabs to jeans. Those are Levi's trademarks. But any manufacturer could spot that the latest trend in denim is the pencil look and start flooding the stores with $50 jeans even as $1,000 ones are flying out of Los Angeles stores.
If Goodlatte's bill wins favor, whoever first revived the pencil fad could seek copyright protection and corner the market on that particular look. (Don't forget this style once gained popularity in the '80s, and I'm still wating for circulation to return to my lower extremities.) Those who can't afford $1,000 jeans would be stuck in today's tattered jeans for three long years.
Nor would the pencil look likely catch on. Limited sales wouldn't spur the critical mass needed to turn it into a must-have.
Even if it did catch, the cutting-edge, pencil-jeans crowd would have zippered its way through several more fads before the rest of us could afford it. We would stop paying attention.
Without constantly spawning trends, fashion would lose its edge, its vibrancy.
Its pace would slacken. People would begin to think of clothing as the basic necessity that it is, rather than the statements that it has become.
Until now, copyright law has considered clothing a utilitarian item and not an artistic expression.
It is both; the concepts are woven tightly together.
If the law attempted to separate one from the other, it would poke holes in the fabric of the fashion industry.
Best for Goodlatte to let his bill fall quickly out of style.
