When is the design both the same?
The latest offering came in the Sydney Morning Herald, 3 September, and won serious acreage on page three.
The text was familiar enough: local and international designers sounding off about being copied. Also familiar was the solution: go forth and register your designs. But there were some holes in the argument.
One was the mixing of copying styles with using counterfeit branding. The two are seldom connected. We've all seen (and may have bought) garments of no particular design merit which sell largely on the designer brand. That's the big story in copying and it hits famous international designer labels the hardest.
The lesser story is the copying of original styles, either from Australian or international designers. This is where the logic gets a bit wobbly.
How many of our so called designers' original styles are really that? How many are either conscious or subconscious copies of other designers' work? The post-war Australian fashion industry has been build upon the 'inspiration' of overseas designers.
Moreover, who is to say that original designers in different parts of the world don't read fashion trends in the same way? The fact that a new look can appear in many different collections at any given time seems to indicate that the cosmos is sending the same message to everybody. I've always believed that the true fashion designer looks at life and interprets it in clothes. To many designers, life can appear to be pretty similar.
Closer to home, the SMH photo of Akira trying to show how his t-shirt has been knocked off didn't convince me. It looked as though the so called copyist may have seen Akira Isogawa's t-shirt (or somebody else's) and thought that sewing lots of colourful buttons on the yoke was a nice idea. But a copy? Nah.
Actually, the main attraction of the picture was the unfortunate optical illusion that Akira had a firm grasp on his model's right nipple – which I'm sure he didn't because he's not that kind of fella.
Getting back to copying, the government has released a booklet which tells designers about their intellectual copyright and suggests they register their designs – at $200 a pop. That's too dear for most genuine designers because they are as poor as church mice. On the other hand, the few rich ones might have to think carefully before they register in case they are re-registering somebody else's work.
There is probably an easy solution to this – apart from suffering copying in silence – and that is to grant automatic copyright to all garment designs. Then those who believe they have been copied can demand to know where an offending design came from and, if they can prove copying, they can claim damages.
But Akira will have to do better than his t-mit-buttons if he wants to bring erring ones to justice.
Who is the top-toughest?
I'm trying to find out which country is the toughest for suppliers to sell to department stores in the hope of concluding that Myer and David Jones are not so bad after all. I've come up with a few side issues but I'm waiting for somebody to say "if you think Myer and David Jones are tough, you should try selling to . . ."
Maybe the stores themselves might jump to their own defence, although this would be out of character with the stoic silence they maintain when I bag them. Incidentally I hear praise for Myer womenswear buyer Anne Despain and menswear buyer Simon Winter as being likely to get good results for the stores without battering suppliers.
My unsupported belief is that Japan and the US would fight it out for top-toughest. I'd like some anecdotes by email. I won't quote you.
In the meantime, a recently returned jeanswear specialist told me that US department stores are cutting back on the number of labels they are running and are carrying more depth in those they do carry. They appear to be treating suppliers reasonably well except where a line doesn't sell. At that point they grow fangs and try to send the clobber back in favour of negotiating a markdown allowance.
US department stores press for exclusivity, which is little different here.
But a big difference is in the small number of stunt sales US department stores run as against ours. At the back of a typical US department there are usually a few racks of reduced lines but the continuing price self mutilation that goes on with our department stores is not evident in the US.
"Akira had a firm grasp on his model's right nipple – which I'm sure he didn't because he's not that kind of fella."
By Fraser McEwing