MoMA: Is Fashion Modern?
Posted: December 21, 2017 Filed under: Accessories, Footwear, General / Musings, Textiles, Womenswear | Tags: 3-D printing, Alexander McQueen, Audrey Hepburn, Birkin bag, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Chanel, Christian Dior, exhibit, Harlem, Hermes, kinematics, Lady Gaga, LBD, little black dress, MOMA, Museum of Modern Art, museums, Ralph Lauren, Thierry Mugler, Versace Comments Off on MoMA: Is Fashion Modern?The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is currently hosting the exhibit, “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” So, what is modern? Back in 1944, the MoMA asked, in an exhibition titled, Is Clothing Modern? in the hope of inspiring museumgoers to, “reconsider their relationship with the clothing they wore.” Today, MoMA asks: Is fashion modern? to provoke thought about the world’s relationship with fashion and to examine how and why it is made. In this exhibition, we see fashion born out of creativity and necessity; created by man and machine. The museum’s elevation of both the evening gown and the flip flop illustrates society’s multifaceted relationship with fashion, clothing, and art.
The curators walk you through the history of fashion, using fashion as a lens through which to view and analyze culture and society. Upon entering, I was pleasantly surprised. The galleries, sparsely but carefully filled, teased visitors with vivid colors, sounds, textures, and interactive displays. The exhibit progresses chronologically and also practically, by starting with base layers like undergarments, switching to classics like the little black dress, then working toward wardrobe fundamentals such as pants and later on, accessories.
Underwear starts out not to be a simple thing. Brassieres, stockings, and then jumpsuits pique visitors to contemplate form, function, and aesthetic. Subsequently, the exhibition moves to khakis, trousers, and collared shirts. This casual wear showcase also highlights how pants have evolved for women. With images of a pants-clad Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Mary Tyler Moore in capris on the Dick Van Dyke Show in the 60’s, the exhibit’s wall labels provide gender-charged commentary on how pant suits became socially acceptable for women.
The exhibit moves forward to a survey of the quintessential little black dress. Just within the exploration of the little black dress, one can see the evolution of fabrics, design, class, and social custom. This collection contains a range of dresses from Christian Dior to Thierry Mugler; starting with a modest Chanel evening dress from 1925 and ending with the controversial, close-fitting Versace cocktail dress worn by Elizabeth Hurley in 1994. The exhibit even highlights the relationship between technology and fashion by including a 3-D printed dress designed via a form of classical mechanics and motion called, kinematics.
Next, fashion is studied as an extension of culture. The collection exalts prints, fabrics, and silhouettes from all over the world, showcasing an anthology of Indian saris, Cuban guayaberas, Ghanian gowns, Brazilian jumpers, and Dashikis inspired by Nigerian prints, yet made right in Harlem.
Flanking one side of the exhibition is a spotlight on men’s suits. The stylistic progression goes from the zoot suit to the power suit, and even a double-breasted pant suit by Ralph Lauren for women. The wide range of tailoring, fabric, and shape is also a reflection on style, age, and class.
After covering each major piece of clothing, the exhibit moves on to highlight accessories. What some may consider superfluous or merely decorative additions, the accessories prove to be staples on their own. This collection looks at show-stopping shoes, handbags, hats, furs, and jewelry. The curators even established a small homage to the famous Hermès Birkin bag and Alexander McQueen’s platform armadillo boots, as worn by Lady Gaga.
But wait: there’s more. The exhibition has small fashion asides where one can find a biker jacket derivative made from polymers and LED lighting, and a textile designed through a computer-programed knitting machine.
“Items: Is Fashion Modern?” is indeed a modern take on fashion. After examining the entire 111 items, it is impossible to walk away uninspired and unprovoked. The curators do an excellent job of covering a wide range of subject matter, addressing the fundamentals of fashion, and examining where fashion is purely aesthetic and less functional, yet nonetheless enthralling and important. The exhibition demonstrates the complexity of fashion, as it can serve as adornment, a reflection of culture, or counterculture. If modern is to reflect the present and recent times, then yes, fashion is modern.
The Museum of Modern Art exhibit, “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” runs through January 28, 2018. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1638
Credit: Candace R. Arrington
Candace Arrington works in Phillips Nizer’s Intellectual Property, Corporate, Fashion, and Entertainment Law Practices.
Gemstones: The Complexity of Colors
Posted: September 18, 2017 Filed under: Accessories, General / Musings | Tags: gems, gemstones, Glenn Preus, Hawaii, jewelry, jewels Comments Off on Gemstones: The Complexity of ColorsI would like to highlight an interesting trend that has developed over the last ten years in the field of gemstone jewelry design and sales. An increasing number of women are joining the jewelry industry in sales and executive positions, as professional buyers for large firms, designers, bench jewelers, store owners and cutters.
In what has been a traditionally male-dominated industry (I know that may sound strange), this encouraging phenomenon has made me see things differently in terms of how I buy, sell and even cut precious stones.
Over ninety percent of gemstones in the marketplace have undergone color treatments to intensify the primary color. For example, such a treatment will make a pink sapphire more pink and less purple, and an aquamarine more blue, less gray-green.
Uniquely, I buy and cut only natural color gemstones. That is, the gems have not undergone any heat or irradiation treatments to alter or improve their color.
I have noticed a decided increase in female buyers as my clients. It occurs to me that men seem to be more focused on primary colors given off by a gemstone while more women are intrigued by undertones (or secondary colors).
The bluish purple undertone of a typical untreated pink sapphire is a feature that women often find extremely interesting. Men, however, quite often just want to see pink and only pink.
Simply put, more men tend not to appreciate or simply do not value the complexity of natural untreated gemstones the way women do. Subtle, yet mysterious, undertones are a captivating hallmark of untreated gemstones. Learning that aesthetic point of view from my increasingly female clientele and “retraining” my eyes over the past ten years has enabled me to better understand what women are seeing in gemstones and has been immensely helpful to me. It seems one can never stop learning, even when it comes to stones literally as old as the hills.
Credit: Glenn Preus | Guest Post
Phillips Nizer would like to thank Glenn Preus for this blog post. Glenn is a gemstone cutter in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He can be reached via Instagram: @glennpreus
In the Fitting Room with the Thieves
Posted: December 21, 2016 Filed under: Accessories, Business Law, Footwear, General / Musings, Menswear, Womenswear | Tags: asset protection, holiday season, holidays, loss prevention, retail, retailers, security, shoplifting, theft Comments Off on In the Fitting Room with the ThievesWhether you call it shoplifting or shrinkage and the people tasked with stopping it the house detectives or the asset protection department, and regardless of what new technology you put into place, if you are a retailer, stealing is a problem that will never go away. When I was in high school, back in New Orleans, I worked weekends and summers at the department store my family owned and operated (and long since shuttered). I got to see firsthand the extent of the problem—which was harder to track in those days before electronic inventory controls. The manager of my department was arrested for stealing a pair of Mickey Mouse suspenders from the warehouse. He had been collared by the four-man security team brought in to replace the aging and quite ineffective store detective. During a big three-day sale taking place over a long summer weekend, as the junior and surely least valuable member of our sales team, I was relegated to sitting in the men’s fitting room, watching for thieves. All I got for my trouble was the chance to alert security to the customer who thought that the fitting room stall belonged in the men’s bathroom and had used it accordingly. That incentivized me to petition for repatriation to the sales floor and, just to be sure my position did not revert, I became the top sales person of my department during the next three-day sale.
Jump some years ahead, and now I find myself working with clients in retail on the law of asset protection. There was the time I had to work with the manager and assistant manager of one department store branch that was being sued for assault and false imprisonment by an alleged shoplifter who claimed he had been injured in his apprehension. The plaintiff appeared at the first hearing on crutches, and justice being as slow as it is, by the time the second hearing came around, he was practically pole vaulting with the things, which his lawyer, who could now hardly catch up with him, obviously told him to keep using in an effort to garner sympathy and a favorable settlement.
It was frustrating to our client, but none of that has changed much. You still need to be sure that you work with counsel to know what you can and cannot do in pursuing, approaching and ultimately challenging a suspected shoplifter. There are rules about that, and they vary from state to state. Just as an example, in New York you need to show that the suspect took possession of the item with an intention to make off with it. If you are found purposefully trying to sneak out a T-shirt by wearing it, give your lawyer a call; but if you tuck the T-shirt under your arm while paying for something else and mistakenly head out with it, you are guilty only of absentmindedness.
As long as retailers work very hard to create demand for what they sell, and as long as objects of desire hang and lie in public view, shoplifting will be a problem. As with all other problems that are certain to occur, it is always best to have policies and procedures in place and to make sure that the individuals charged with being the first line of defense—the sales staff—are thoroughly briefed on what to do. It is prudent to have counsel and the security team conduct periodic joint seminars with sales and security personnel. As with everything else in the law, the proverbial ounce of prevention will alleviate the need for the more than typically expensive, when it comes to litigation, pound of cure.
Credit: Alan Behr
This Way or That
Posted: July 27, 2016 Filed under: Accessories, Intellectual Property, Menswear | Tags: Brooks Brothers, copyright infringement, copyright protection, fashion design, neckties, Repp tie, ties, trademark protection, trademarks Comments Off on This Way or ThatA young lawyer walked by while working late, waving the striped tie he had just removed, announcing that, after 9:00 p.m., business casual was mandatory. European-born, my colleague’s tie had blue, white and green stripes angled downward from left to right (as seen by the wearer), in the classic British (and predominantly European) tradition. In Britain, the convention developed that, just as each clan in Scotland has its own tartan, each regiment, club and school would likely have its own, distinctive, diagonally striped tie.
On not quite as classic but by now traditional American ties, however, diagonal stripes run in the opposite direction, from right to left. There are various stories about why that is so. As with anything you can find on the Internet, you can discover much that is of interest, some of which might even prove to be true. You may learn, for instance, that the reason the ties slant in different directions is that European infantrymen shouldered their weapons differently from Americans and that their rifles ejected spent casings in an opposite direction. Those explanations are not only fogged by inaccuracy but bear little evidence of good fashion sense.
More credible is the claim by Brooks Brothers that it invented the American right to left downward slide on what it calls a Repp tie (freely admitting that an early spelling error caused it to get wrong the name of the French Rep ribbed silk fabric it used to make the ties). The idea was to bring American “roguish charm” to British tradition–an act that, as is often the case when Americans reference British traditions–acts as both homage and gentle satire. The British officers and gentlemen men who earned the right to wear regimental colors around their necks sometimes being quite sensitive about having earned the exclusive right to that privilege, Brooks Brothers reversed the direction of the stripe in an effort to soothe warrior sensitivities.
American schools have their Repp variations. My American university’s thick-striped tie, in navy blue and burgundy, is guaranteed to dull down almost any suit that goes with it.
The striped tie having now been commonplace for over a century, uncountable combinations of alternating stripe widths and colors have been used. A designer looking to protect his or her intellectual property rights in the patterns of ties may theoretically create a novel combination of colors and widths running in either direction–just enough to warrant a claim for copyright protection. Given the multiplicity of existing designs, that protection, if granted, would likely be a “thin copyright,” but in theory it could happen. The larger question is: why bother? Individual styles rarely last more than one season, after all. Would you really sue to protect the design, hoping the defendant does not dig into neckwear history to find something similar warn by officers of a British regiment since before it fought in the Battle of the Somme?
Each of those regimental, school and club ties identifies a source of origin–raising the possibility that a particular pattern of stripes can be protected as a trademark. As a practical matter, unless a stripe acquires such distinctiveness that the market accepts that it designates a specific source and so is not merely decorative, it is probably not protectable as a trademark. It is possible, again in theory, that a particular pattern of stripes could gain “secondary meaning.” That is, they now serve, through usage, advertising and the passage of time, as branding and devices not merely as pleasing patterns. If that should happen, is it indeed enough of a difference to prevent a claim of infringement to run the same pattern in the opposite direction, just as Brooks Brothers and other American makers did in order to distinguish their patterns from those British ties from which they freely borrowed both conventions and patterns? Much could depend on survey evidence of consumer habits and consumer awareness of the differences. That is another way of saying: if you did not know about all that before reading this post, the difference in the direction of the stripes probably is of no consequence to you; your response to the survey would therefore likely aid the plaintiff in a claim that simply changing the direction of the stripes did not make the defendant’s pattern less likely to cause infringing confusion.
That would support the generally held view that, when it comes to neckties, diagonal stripes, in whatever direction they run, are, in nearly all situations, open territory for designers. Within the quite narrow sartorial conventions of male business attire, however, there is not really all that much new that can likely be done with diagonal stripes in neckties. So, let us all celebrate an ongoing tradition and try not to worry too much about all this. A good striped tie will not necessarily be the one that a lawyer attempts to protect as intellectual property. It will, however, always be one that will work for him just about anywhere.
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We would like to thank Stephen Sidkin of Fox Williams LLP, London, UK, for providing the inspiration and background for this post.
Credit: Alan Behr
Seeing With Your Third Eye
Posted: June 1, 2016 Filed under: Accessories, Intellectual Property | Tags: copyright, eye glasses, eyewear, patents, sunglasses, trade dress Comments Off on Seeing With Your Third EyeBecause almost everybody wears glasses of some kind, part of the pathway of the ascent of a designer will quite often include an eyewear line. Personal optics is a field in which design must coexist with the demands of mechanics, durability and, for vision eyewear, medical requirements. With those few exceptions that inevitably come along, if what you find fits, does the job and, just maybe makes you look cool or at least not uncool–you will generally be content.
Of course, there are unique eyewear designs, but intellectual property law is tough on those who claim design rights for functional objects. Patent protection is reserved for the kind of innovation that rises to the level of the better mousetrap–meaning, by metaphor, that the new trap indeed should catch mice in a way not previously practiced or commonly anticipated. For the non-functional design elements of eyewear, protection can sometimes be obtained by design patent, copyright and either a trademark or trade dress. (Trade dress protection on the features of an object of any kind, rather than the packaging it came in, is a challenge for a different discussion.) There are particular requirements for each form of protection, meaning it is possible that one style of eyewear may qualify for one form of protection, for more than one form or for none at all.
By way of some exaggeration for a point, should you wish to protect a new eyewear design, you might have a credible chance of having the law support your claim if it were for sunglasses with not two but three lenses. That is to say, try designing frames on which a third, completely useless lens would be placed smack in the middle, over the bridge, to shade an imaginary third eye. To improve your chances, across the top of the frames place an original, melancholic relief illustrating a tragic moment from Longfellow’s “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” Along each temple add a declaratory statement such as: “Some People Will do Anything for Attention.” I am not going to speculate on your likely sales of that item during the fall-winter season, but some elements may prove to be protectable, as may a combination of elements.
This is not to suggest that you have to go quite that far to obtain rights for eyewear. All exaggeration aside, I have been quite successful doing so over the years for more mundane but far more elegant original variations on eyewear construction and design. And I have been able to defend those elements against infringement. The point is that, for something as common as glasses, whether for reading, vision or protection against the sun, you have to be inventive to come up with something strongly protectable. When you do, you would be well-advised to consult with your attorney about what elements, alone or in combination, can be protected by copyright, design patent, trademark or trade dress. You do not need to add the third lens to make that happen. You simply need to know enough to ask your lawyers whether what you have created is legally protectable, as well as being, of course, something both functional and beautiful.
Credit: Alan Behr