On November 23 and 24 the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Italy’s Ministry of Productive Activities and the Italian Institute for Industrial Promotion will play host to an international conference in Caserta, Italy. The meeting will be looking at the importance of intellectual property to the textile and clothing industry.
Indeed despite its seemingly frivolous nature, fashion and the infrastructure that supports it is a billion dollar industry. A creative industry moreover driven firstly by the need to create something unique and then by the need to protect that unique product and the intellectual capital invested in it.
However not everyone believes the industry exists as a creator of unique works. Coco Chanel for example was reported to have famously said: “Fashion should slip out of your hands. The very idea of protecting the seasonal arts is childish. One should not bother to protect that which dies the minute it is born.” And indeed it seems protecting her IP was one of Coco Chanel’s lesser concerns. In fact reports suggest she never received a fraction of her monetary due from the licensing of the classic Chanel Number 5 perfume.
While most can’t afford the $10,000 couture Gucci gowns that regularly grace the Paris catwalks, many can however take part in the luxury ‘lifestyle’ that designer names signify. By simply purchasing those relatively inexpensive perfumes, cosmetics or leather goods that fashion houses regularly produce, we the public salute the god of luxury and they, the design houses salute us – the general public – as it is these product sales that provide them the bulk of their profit.
Yet despite these great financial gains, no other industry is more prone to being ‘ripped off’. The growing proliferation of less expensive copies of high priced fashions and knock offs of luxury items regularly saturate the current global fashion market. So much so that ‘fake’ even has fashion cachet.
Images of designer gowns worn by media celebrities at highly publicized events are instantly disseminated through global media forums to an eager public and an even more eager counterfeit couture industry. And copies of these faux couture items often hit fashion stores months before the significantly more expensive originals. However, unlike other areas of creative or artistic endeavor, such as music or literature, few of the same intellectual property rights exist to protect these original works and their creators.
‘Intellectual Property’ refers directly to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce. The tools of the intellectual property system play a vital role in helping to establish and consolidate both an individual artist’s rights as they relate to the use of their creations, as well as a company’s market position. By seeking to protect their intellectual capital in the form of intellectual property assets, fashion houses are able to boost revenue, raise profit margins and improve their market share through the sale, licensing, and commercialization of a variety of new products.
Intellectual property falls into four distinct categories. They are trademarks, patents, designs and copyright. But the protection they afford to designers and fashion companies in the current fashion arena have varying degrees of success.
Trademarks promote immediate brand recognition and differentiate items from competitors’ products, such as the Nike swoosh symbol. This is one of the strongest areas of legal protection for fashion items and company logos. Patents meanwhile can be lodged for inventions that lead to the creation of new, improved products and processes capable of industrial application. However, with the fast pace of the fashion industry in terms of design change and turnover, patents applications, which are expensive and can take considerable time to be approved, are often of little value or protection.
Visual designs in turn are all about being globally distinctive. The Versace style is a great example of this. And it all relates to a product’s appearance and promotes an often carefully crafted and instantly recognizable ‘lifestyle’ image.
And copyright, which is a number of legally enforceable rights provides the owner of a created work with the exclusive rights to exploit their own creations. Copyright law provides limited protection for the designers. While copyright protection can be used to protect printed designs on fabric as well as a designers fashion sketches, the garment itself has no such protection and can freely be copied at will.
Large fashion houses often have the financial and legal means at their disposal to protect themselves from design pirates. Individual artists without such backing, however, are often left to fend for themselves in an unfamiliar legal arena they know nothing about – an ignorance that unscrupulous copyists eagerly exploit.
But it’s not all bad news, and action groups are springing up across the international landscape. Their intent? To fight off these fashion pirates of course. Organizations such as the UK-based ACID (Anti Copying In Design) fiercely declare that they are “fighting for improvements and changes to copyright laws in tangent with contemporary commercial requirements to help protect original ideas”. And even though Coco Chanel may have creatively scoffed at the idea of protecting something so fleeting as fashion, industry leaders realize in their particularly market driven sector, uniqueness is all about branding, and branding is the daughter of Intellectual Property.
