Sleepless Travels Reloaded

Louis Vuitton Fall Winter 2007-2008 by Annie Leibovitz with Mikhail Gorbachev

I won’t address all the issues but here’s a summary of what I have swirling in my head:

Why designs should be copyrightable:

• Encouraging innovation and creativity, all very warm and fuzzy goals. Larger job market for designers.
• Quality. Designers have a reputation to keep and are more likely to use better materials, better workmanship etc.
• Warm and fuzzy feelings over owning a genuine article which is limited and coveted by many. To have the feeling of having ‘made it’. To feel that you can appreciate art and fashion more than anyone else around you. To have a sense of superiority. To say, ‘Har, har, I have more money than you.’
• Slave labour. As citizens of the world we are under an obligation not to support the slave-like conditions garment workers work in.
• Price. Just because all original designs have been pricey in the past doesn’t mean they have to be pricey into the glorious future where creativity and design is embraced!

Why things should stay the way they are:

• Price. Average consumer has better things to spend money on, doesn’t care that much about fashion.
• Investment. Sure the quality may not be as good (and this is making an assumption, modern production methods can be rather good) but is it really worth it? Take a $2000 LV handbag with a $200 inspired design for example. The quality of the LV would only be worth it if the inspired design would have to be replaced more than 10 times during the LV’s lifetime.
• ‘Conspiracy’ to keep prices up. You can’t convince me that a designer t-shirt is really worth and $80+ pricetag. It doesn’t cost that much to produce and screen print a t-shirt, no matter what kind of special materials you use. Well, I suppose it’s just business. Who wouldn’t want to create brand prestige? With demand, desirability and envy one can charge a price far in excess of cost prices (including humongous marketing budgets I’d bet) and consumers would still be falling over themselves to buy. One could be cynical and say that in fact inflating prices and cutting supply creates that very same desirability and demand…
• Modern technology. We have nice big machines now. Shouldn’t we use them? Behold the wonder of modern efficiency! While quality is often equated with extended human involvment, a certain level of “handmadeness”, if you will, there are many instances when it just doesn’t matter or where machines just do a better job as they are always consistent, don’t get distracted etcetc. Like t-shirts.
• Class divide. Is it fair that only the very rich can buy new clothes with any regularity? On the other hand thise doesn’t excuse counterfeiting. Like mp3s, just because you can’t afford it doesn’t mean you can steal it. If the design piracy bill is enacted inspired designs would be pushed into this area. I wonder what would the real consequences of the act be?
• Economy. If the extreme doomsday scenario discussed above comes about and spending on clothes drops, doesn’t that mean shops sell less and make less money and won’t be able to hire as many staff? Well they can still sell standard non-copyrightable stuff like basic t-shirts, knits etc but I would have thought one of the main drivers of demand were seasonal trends and our lemming-like need to stay fashionable. And these seasonal clothes are in turn mostly copied from the runway…

  I don’t actually think if will get that bad though. High street shops will just have to find more creative ways to dance on the border (misdirected creativity? Hmm). New lines will be drawn; and copiers will produce clothing that are intentionally only different enough to avoid a suit. A longer hemline, perhaps 3/4 sleeves instead of long sleeves. A round neck instead of v-neck. Pleats where there was lace. Is that enough? Wait, is that a different garment already? Man I’m creative!

P.S. I know my doomsday fashion scenario is really impossible, as in even cheap outlets have their own designers with original-but-perhaps-not-entirely-innovative-products, but I was wondering what would happen if things were brought to that extreme.

P.P.S. Yes that really is Gorbachev! The ad features him sittin in the back seat of a Khrushchev-era Soviet limousine. The particular section of the Berlin Wall in the background was chosen by Mr Gorbachev himself - it was a section that Reagan once challenged Gorbachev to tear down. Love the political overtones.
(See other posts in this series here)