The Intellectual Property Of Textiles And Fashion From The Medieval Loom To The New York Fashion Week

Rampant global counterfeiting has led the fashion industry to seek ever greater enforcement of its intellectual property (IP) rights. Yet, as this hugely informative book shows, this is not new. Fashion designers and entrepreneurs, as well as manufacturers and tradespeople in the broader textiles industry from which fashion springs, have always struggled to convert existing IP rules to an industry that was—and is—configured by the pressure of intrinsically fleeting consumer tastes and trends. The distinguished author, adding to the series of major works that have made him a leading authority on IP law, triumphantly reveals in great detail how society has constructed IP in association with textiles so as to accommodate it to the particular characteristics of fashion that emerged in the last century. More than two hundred sources, many of them for the first time available in English, illustrated with fifty figures, allow the reader to directly encounter those who have made and continue to make the IP of textiles and fashion. The underlying raisons d’être of such aspects as the following become brilliantly clear: how fashion designers protect their creations against the spread of knock-offs; how fashion entrepreneurs appropriate prestige and reputation; how an iconic design becomes a brand or acquires secondary meaning; and how such inventions as the sewing machine and the cotton gin affected IP rights in textiles and fashion. Each source is preceded by a note placing it in its social, economic, and legal context. The sources are structured in two chapters (business identifiers—trade and certification marks, geographical indications—and appropriation of knowledge and creativity—patents, designs, copyright, and trade secrets) so as to permit an easy understanding of the enchainment of important moments that have contributed to give IP for textiles and fashion its special configuration, in particular the transition from textile law to fashion law. With this book, listening directly to the voices of those who have made and make IP, academics, students, magistrates, professionals, and the legal community as a whole will have a clear and realistic sense of how the combination of the entrepreneurial spirit with the imperatives of human consumption has designed and continues designing the special scope and limits of IP as applied to textiles and fashion.

Fashion law encompasses a wide variety of issues that concern an article of clothing or a fashion accessory, starting from the moment they are designed and following them through distribution and marketing phases, all the way until they reach the end-user. Contract law, intellectual property, company law, tax law, international trade, and customs law are of fundamental importance in defining this new field of law that is gradually taking shape. This volume focuses on the new frontiers of fashion law, taking into account the various fields that have recently emerged as being of great interest for the entire fashion world: from sustainable fashion to wearable technologies, from new remedies to cultural appropriation to the regulation of model weight, from advertising law on the digital market to the impact of new technologies on product distribution. The purpose is to stimulate discussion on contemporary problems that have the potential to define new boundaries of fashion law, such as the impact of the heightened ethical sensitivity of consumers (who increasingly require effective solutions), that a comparative law perspective renders more interesting. The volume seeks to sketch out the new legal fields in which the fashion industry is getting involved, identifying the new boundaries of fashion law that existing literature has not dealt with in a comprehensive manner.

Writing with inside knowledge of the fashion industry, and with authoritative source material, the author has prepared a practical direct guide to the concerns of the industry. The text is clear and concise with numerous case studies.

Filling a critical gap in Vienna 1900 studies, this book offers a new reading of fin-de-si?e culture in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy by looking at the unusual and widespread preoccupation with embroidery, fabrics, clothing, and fashion - both literally and metaphorically. The author resurrects lesser known critics, practitioners, and curators from obscurity, while also discussing the textile interests of better known figures, notably Gottfried Semper and Alois Riegl. Spanning the 50-year life of the Dual Monarchy, this study uncovers new territory in the history of art history, insists on the crucial place of women within modernism, and broadens the cultural history of Habsburg Central Europe by revealing the complex relationships among art history, women, and Austria-Hungary. Rebecca Houze surveys a wide range of materials, from craft and folk art to industrial design, and includes overlooked sources-from fashion magazines to World's Fair maps, from exhibition catalogues to museum lectures, from feminist journals to ethnographic collections. Restoring women to their place at the intersection of intellectual and artistic debates of the time, this book weaves together discourses of the academic, scientific, and commercial design communities with middle-class life as expressed through popular culture.

During the medieval period, people invested heavily in looking good. The finest fashions demanded careful chemistry and compounds imported from great distances and at considerable risk to merchants; the Church became a major consumer of both the richest and humblest varieties of cloth, shoes, and adornment; and vernacular poets began to embroider their stories with hundreds of verses describing a plethora of dress styles, fabrics, and shopping experiences. Drawing on a wealth of pictorial, textual and object sources, the volume examines how dress cultures developed – often to a degree of dazzling sophistication – between the years 800 to 1450. Beautifully illustrated with 100 images, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, visual representations, and literary representations.

The time span covered by The Routledge History of Fashion and Dress starts in the nineteenth century, with the aftermath of the consumers’ revolution, and reaches all the way to the present. The fashion and garment industries have been international from the beginning and, as such, this volume looks at the history of fashion and dress through the lenses of both international and global history. Because fashion is also a multifaceted subject with humanagency at its core, at the confluence of thematerial (fabrics, clothing, dyes, tools, and machines) and the immaterial (savoir-faire, identities, images, and brands), this volume adopts a transdisciplinary perspective, opening its pages to researchers from a variety of complementary fields. The chapters in this volume are organized based on their relationship to five fields of study: economics and commerce, politics, business, identities, and historical sources. Paying particular attention to change, the book goes beyond the great fashion capitals and well-known fashion centers and points to the broader geographies of fashion. Particular geographical areas focus on the emergence of new fashion systems and business models, whether they be in Sweden, Bangladesh, or Spain, or on the African continent, considered to be the “new frontier” of the industry. Covering myriad aspects of the subject this is the perfect companion for all those interested in history of dress and fashion in the modern world.

In this wide-ranging study of costume history contributors explore fashion, textiles, and the representation of clothing in the middle ages. Essays combine the perspectives of archaeology, art history, economics, religion, costume history, material culture, and literary criticism and explore materials from England, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, and Ireland. The collection focuses on multiple aspects of textiles and dress - their making, meaning, and representation - and explores the impact of international trade and other forms of cultural exchange.