Postmodern Theory and Internet George Ritzer

5:31 Tom Ford: And we found after much research that—actually not much 

research, quite simple research—that the counterfeit customer was not our 

customer.

5:39 Johanna Blakley: Imagine that. The people on Santee Alley are not the 

ones who shop at Gucci.(Laughter) This is a very different demographic. And, 

you know, a knock-off is never the same as an original high-end design, at least 

in terms of the materials; they’re always made of cheaper materials.But even 

sometimes a cheaper version can actually have some charming aspects, can 

breathe a little extra life into a dying trend. There’s lots of virtues of copying. 

One that a lot of cultural critics have pointed to is that we now have a much 

broader palette of design choices to choose from than we ever have before,  

and this is mainly because of the fast fashion industry, actually. And this is  

a good thing. We need lots of options.

6:27 Fashion, whether you like it or not, helps you project who you are to the 

world. Because of fast fashion,global trends actually get established much more 

quickly than they used to. And this, actually, is good news to trendsetters; they 

want trends to be set so that they can move product. For fashionistas, they want 

to stay ahead of the curve. They don’t want to be wearing what everybody else 

is wearing. And so, they want to move on to the next trend as soon as possible.

6:58 I tell you, there is no rest for the fashionable. Every season, these designers 

have to struggle to come up with the new fabulous idea that everybody’s going to 

love. And this, let me tell you, is very good for the bottom line. Now of course, 

there’s a bunch of effects that this culture of copying has on the creative process. 

And Stuart Weitzman is a very successful shoe designer. He has complained a lot 

about people copying him, but in one interview I read, he said it has really forced 

him to up his game.He had to come up with new ideas, new things that would be 

hard to copy. He came up with this Bowden-wedge heel that has to be made out of 

steel or titanium; if you make it from some sort of cheaper material, it’ll actually 

crack in two. It forced him to be a little more innovative. (Music)

7:43 And that actually reminded me of jazz great, Charlie Parker. I don’t know 

if you’ve heard this anecdote, but I have. He said that one of the reasons he 

invented bebop was that he was pretty sure that white musicians wouldn’t be 

able to replicate the sound. (Laughter) He wanted to make it too difficult to 

copy, and that’s what fashion designers are doing all the time. They’re trying 

to put together a signature look, an aesthetic that reflects who they are. When 

people knock it off, everybody knows because they’ve put that look out on the 

runway, and it’s a coherent aesthetic.

Lessons from Fashions Free Culture ………………………………………………………… Johanna Blakley

https://www.upworthy.com/the-unexpected-thing-that-fashion-does-hippies-love-and-corporations-are-totally-scared-of

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8:22 I love these Gallianos. Okay, we’ll move on. (Laughter)

8:26 This is not unlike the world of comedy. I don’t know if you know that 

jokes also can’t be copyright protected. So when one-liners were really popular, 

everybody stole them from one another. But now, we have a different kind of 

comic. They develop a persona, a signature style, much like fashion designers. 

And their jokes, much like the fashion designs by a fashion designer, really only 

work within that aesthetic. If somebody steals a joke from Larry David, for 

instance, it’s not as funny.

8:57 Now, the other thing that fashion designers have done to survive in this 

culture of copying is they’ve learned how to copy themselves. They knock 

themselves off. They make deals with the fast fashion giants and they come up 

with a way to sell their product to a whole new demographic: the Santee Alley 

demographic.

9:14 Now, some fashion designers will say, “It’s only in the United States that 

we don’t have any respect. In other countries there is protection for our artful 

designs.” But if you take a look at the two other biggest markets in the world, 

it turns out that the protection that’s offered is really ineffectual. In Japan, for 

instance, which I think is the third largest market, they have a design law; it 

protects apparel, but the novelty standard is so high, you have to prove that 

your garment has never existed before, it’s totally unique. And that’s sort of 

like the novelty standard for a U.S. patent, which fashion designers never get— 

rarely get here in the states.

9:53 In the European Union, they went in the other direction. Very low novelty 

standard, anybody can register anything. But even though it’s the home of the 

fast fashion industry and you have a lot of luxury designers there, they don’t 

register their garments, generally, and there’s not a lot of litigation. It turns 

out it’s because the novelty standard is too low. A person can come in and take 

somebody else’s gown,cut off three inches from the bottom, go to the E.U. and 

register it as a new, original design. So, that does not stop the knock-off artists. 

If you look at the registry, actually, a lot of the registered things in the E.U. are 

Nike T-shirts that are almost identical to one another.

10:32 But this has not stopped Diane von Furstenberg. She is the head of the 

Council of Fashion Designers of America, and she has told her constituency 

that she is going to get copyright protection for fashion designs. The retailers 

have kind of quashed this notion though. I don’t think the legislation is going 

anywhere, because they realized it is so hard to tell the difference between  

Lessons from Fashions Free Culture ………………………………………………………… Johanna Blakley

https://www.upworthy.com/the-unexpected-thing-that-fashion-does-hippies-love-and-corporations-are-totally-scared-of

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