California Apparel News

I’m a free-lance fashion designer working in Los Angeles, and for the life of me, I can’t see what all the fuss is with regard to S. 3728. To me, it seems like a pretty good start for reforming some rather unethical practices that go on in the fashion business. After standing by on the sidelines, listening to the debate on this subject, I’ve decided that the time had come for me to throw my hat into the ring and get all “OP-ED” on the subject.

A lot of people know me for my participation on the reality show “Project Runway,” and I have to say, the contract that I signed with NBC/Bravo/Universal, protecting the intellectual property of the Weinstein company, makes this bill look like a third grader’s hall pass!

From a designer’s point of view, the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act seems like a pretty cool piece of legislation that would basically make it illegal to plagiarize the work of another designer until three years after the date that they made their designs public. From where I’m sitting, that’s attractive. Times are tough out here in fashionville, kids. We should be pretty excited about a bill that might bench some of the players that like to play this game dirty, making some room for the rest of us.

Personally, I’ve always dreamt of a day when a boss walks into my office and says, “Hey, Andraeacute;, I was reading an article on how the work of Madeleine Vionnet is in the public domain, and I think some of the techniques she developed in 1928 might be worth revisiting for our Spring 2012. Why don’t you see what you can come up with and get back to me?” How different this would be from the day that I came into the office and there was a stack of images torn from the tabloids on my desk and a Post-It that read “COPY EXACT!”For heaven’s sake, if you want me copying for you, at least be original enough to pick something historical.

Apparently, there’s a group of people in this industry who don’t consider design plagiarism to be an unethical business practice, and they resent any law that would fine them for committing it. Isn’t that just plain wrong? Or, at the least, lazy? And yes, I know my fashion history. Americans have been stealing fashion designs from the Europeans since the invention of the sewing machine. In France, there are documented cases of Chanel and Vionnet joining forces in the ’30s to file a lawsuit against a firm that was stealing their designs and selling them to American manufacturers.

What I don’t understand is how manufacturers can not only be okay with this status quo but fight to maintain it. What really endangers the fashion industry is not the specter of plagiarism regulation but monotony. For heaven’s sake, now more than ever, don’t we need a surge of creativity in this business? Just because things have always been this way doesn’t mean that they should be this way forever. Institutionalized plagiarism is still plagiarism, and I defy anyone to convince me otherwise.

Furthermore, as an American designer—no, as an L.A. designer—I’d like to get a little respect. In short, this law basically says, “We know that you uncreative people like copying things, so at least do us the favor of knocking off fashions from the vast public domain, or if that’s not good enough, choose a current design that’s old enough to go to pre-school.”How can you be against that?Seriously, if you’re not clever enough to find something to knock off from the entire art historical record of the 20th century, maybe you should be giving a second thought to your career.

Frankly, I think we should get with the times. Thanks to the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, there is an ethical climate shift occurring for all American businesses, and “business as usual” is about to be replaced by “business as ethical.” S. 3728 is the first chill of an ice age that heralds the inevitable extinction of the great garmento-saurus.

If you’ll forgive the clicheacute;, there was a time when plagiarism was “in,” and I think it’s time for it to be “out.”

Andraeacute; Gonzalo was born and educated in Los Angeles and works as a conceptualist and designer-for-hire in the downtown garment district.