In recent years, there has been much debate about the need for intellectual property protection for fashion designs. Two bills introduced before the 111th Congress purported to provide a solution for this need. The Design Piracy Prohibition Act ("DPPA"), which was introduced in the House April 3, 2009, and the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act ("IDPPPA"), which was introduced in the Senate on August 5, 2010 would have amended Chapter 13 of the Copyright Act to provide sui generis protection for fashion designs. While some scholars worry that bills like the DPPA and the IDPPPA would stifle creativity, many designers think that such protection would afford them more freedom to create new and innovative designs. Scholarly debate aside, piracy is a $12 billion drain on the fashion industry that "steals the very essence of enterprise" by diluting branding and making it more difficult for new designers to begin their careers. Because current intellectual property laws do not address the unique issues involved in fashion design, pirates appropriate, or even directly replicate, others' designs even while facing a constant stream of lawsuits. For example, the company Forever 21, one of the most notorious design thieves, has been the subject of over fifty lawsuits between 2006 and 2009 alone. Unfortunately, intellectual property law's current status makes it very difficult for designers to find relief for their pirated designs. This Comment discusses the piracy problems plaguing the fashion industry and offers a potential solution based on combining the best aspects of the DPPA and the IDPPPA. Part II examines design piracy - both what it is and the attempts that have been made to gain protection against it - and discusses why current jurisprudence insufficiently addresses the needs of the American fashion industry. Part III.A analyzes the need to protect fashion designs and addresses opponents' concerns. In light of those concerns, Part III.B examines how each bill addresses design piracy and suggests potential changes that would make each bill more effective at protecting fashion designs. Finally, Part IV offers parting commentary.

The fashion and apparel industry is big business in both the United States and abroad. With the growth of the fashion industry and the role of the media in disseminating fashion commentary, public awareness about prominent fashion designers and the creations of such designers is at an all-time high. The popularity and status attached to certain designers and their trademark designs, therefore, has led to the rise of “style piracy.” A style pirate will copy a designer's original creative work to capitalize on the popularity or desirability of the product. The copying can occur in varying degrees, including attempts to pass off counterfeit copies as the original, or the creation of “designer-inspired” products that seek to profit by giving the impression of relatedness to the original. Despite the potential loss of substantial revenue and exclusive control over the use of original designs facing designers, few legal rightsexist to protect these valuable creative and economic interests from misuse by style-pirates. Specifically, United States laws extend spotty legal protections, at best, against counterfeit and knockoff designs. The Copyright Act fails to provide adequate protection because its protection is generally limited to non-utilitarian designs. Thus, the inherent usefulness of apparel traditionally exists as a barrier to protection through copyright law. Given the shortcomings of copyright law, many designers have turned to trademark law and secondary meaning in trademarks as a means of circumventing the requirements of copyright law in order to defend against style-pirates and achieve some modest level of design protection. Although trademark law has been extended to utilitarian items in some cases, only a small portion of designs will ever reach the level of recognition and notoriety required for this type of protection. The interplay of both copyright and trademark law in this area highlights (1) the fact that neither copyright law nor trademark law affords sufficient protection for the original designs of fashion designers, and (2) the need for a more comprehensive plan for protecting creative but utilitarian works such as fashion designs. Based on the shortcomings of the copyright and trademark laws to provide adequate rights and remedies for fashion designers, this article argues that the copyright eligibility requirements should be extended to encompass the original and creative elements of fashion designs, such that the framework of copyright law, and not trademark law, becomes the primary method of design protection.

Artificial intelligence (AI) now infiltrates our culture. After a couple of difficult winters, AI today is a word on everybody’s lips, and it attracts everyone’s attention regardless of whether they are experts or not. From Apple’s Siri to Amazon’s Alexa, Tesla’s auto-driving cars to facial recognition systems in CCTV cameras, Netflix’s film offering services to Google’s search engine, we live in a world of AI goods. The advent of AI-powered technologies increasingly affects people’s lives across the globe. As a tool for productivity and cost-efficiency, AI also shapes our economy and welfare. AI-generated designs and works are becoming more popular. Today, AI technologies can generate several intellectual creations. Fashion is one of the industries that AI can profoundly impact. AI tools and devices are currently being used in the fashion industry to create fashion models, fabric and jewellery designs, and clothing. When we talk about AI-generated designs, we instead focus on the fruits of innovation – more best-selling apparels, more fashionable designs and more fulfilment of customer expectations – without paying heed to who the designer is. Designers invest a lot of talent, time and finances into designing and creating each article of clothing and accessory before they release their work to the public. Pattern drafting is the first and most important step in dressmaking. Designers typically start with a general sketch on paper; add styles, elements and colours; revise and refine everything; and finally deliver their design to dressmakers. AI accelerates this time-consuming and labour-intensive process. Yet the full legal consequences of AI in fashion industry are often forgotten. An AI device’s ability to generate fashion designs raises the question of who will own intellectual property rights over the fashion designs. Will it be the fashion designer who hires or contracts with the AI programmer? Will it be the programmer? Will it be the AI itself? Or will it be a joint work of humans and computers? And who will be liable for infringement deriving from use of third-party material in AI-generated fashion designs? This book explores answers to these questions within the framework of EU design and copyright laws. It also crafts a solution proposal based on a three-step test and model norms, which could be used to unleash the authors, rights holders and infringers around AI-generated fashion designs.

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.

Just as the clothes we wear can communicate our personality and how we want to be perceived, so fashion can reflect the politics and preoccupations of the society that produced it. A Cultural History of Western Fashion guides you through the relationships between haute couture and ready-to-wear designer fashions, popular culture, big business, high-tech production, as well as traditional and social media. Exploring fashion's interdisciplinary nature, English and Munroe also highlight the parallel evolution of clothing design and the other visual arts over the last 150 years. This new edition includes expanded coverage of the build up to the First World War and brings this classic text up to date. There is also a new chapter on smart textiles and technology, exploring the work of Hussein Chalayan and Iris Van Herpen among others, and expanded coverage of the role of sustainability in the contemporary fashion industry, including biosynthetic textile production and Stella McCartney's use of vegan leather.