Testimony of David Wolfe, Creative Director The ... - Public Knowledge

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Introduction introduction page 8 | Ready to Share: Fashion & the Ownership of Creativity BY DAVID BOLLIER AND LAURIE RACINE Kevan Hall talks about the influence of his muse, Millicent Rogers, on his designs. This book is an exploration into creativity — how it originates in our society, the means by which it circulates from one person to another, and the role that intellectual property law plays in encouraging or impeding the flow of creativity. One of the most instructive arenas for studying these themes, we discovered, is the fashion industry. Fashion has the virtue of being ubiquitous, with a creative narrative that is familiar and easy to comprehend. It is at once personal, visual, historical, evolving and completely inescapable. Fashion offers us a compelling story arc for understanding how creativity works from its inception, as an inspired idea, through the creative process and into the marketplace. To document and explore this journey, the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication held a conference titled “Ready to Share: Fashion & the Ownership of Creativity“ in January 2005. We brought together top fashion designers, industry analysts, retailers, attorneys, copyright scholars, songwriters, musicians, high-tech experts and others to talk about the complicated ecology of creativity in fashion. The hypothesis was that the tradition of open appropriation and transformation in fashion contributes significantly to that industry’s creative vitality and economic success. Fashion seems to draw its life’s breath from a creative and cultural commons — a shared pool of artistic design and cultural references that is constantly changing and churning in all sorts of novel, unpredictable ways. In this sense, fashion resembles the creative genres of the Internet — or more precisely, those genres resemble fashion, which in its modern form has been around for decades. To venture onto the World Wide Web is to enter a zone of recombinant creativity, a place where the differences between originality and imitation are often difficult to discern. There are many brilliant individuals, to be sure, each of whom adds original verve to writing, music and visual works. But what may most distinguish the online world is how the collective origins of new ideas are more readily apparent. A creative fragment from one Web site often is added to another, and mixed with a third — much as mash-up artists like Danger Mouse have combined the music of Jay-Z and The Beatles with improbable success. Bricolage is the order of the day. In fact, the French term bricolage lies at the heart of the matter. Bricolage refers to the recombinant process in which everything gets mixed and morphed, and incongruous elements are synthesized into something new. The term seems to describe perfectly the creative processes of fashion, where most everything that ever has been designed is considered fair game for new creations. The intellectual property restrictions on bricolage in fashion are nearly nonexistent. page 9
Introduction How can an industry built upon open borrowing and re-use of other people’s work thrive financially? page 10 | Ready to Share: Fashion & the Ownership of Creativity Unlike the online culture, however, modern fashion has been practicing its brand of bricolage for decades. The means by which vintage clothing is plundered for new ideas are fairly well-established. We can examine the diversified market ecology that popularizes haute couture at lower price points and, simultaneously, elevates open “street fashion” into high-priced designer styles. Fashion gives us a window into the tension between the open commons and the proprietary market. It helps us understand both the contradictions and the synergies between the two, and how each is indispensable to the other. Looking at creativity in fashion gives us a richer, more complex appreciation for the meaning of “originality” and the importance of imitation in questions, as the title of our conference suggests, is whether creative design is “ready to share.” The history of fashion suggests that it is. Fashion designers routinely appropriate and transform prior works, generating innovations that reflect both their individual talents and different times and contexts. The first essay in this volume, “Between the Cracks, a Fertile Commons: An Overview of the Relationship Between Fashion and Intellectual Property,” by intellectual property attorney Christine Cox and Duke Law professor Jennifer Jenkins, offers an overview of the relationship between fashion and intellectual property. Drawing upon fashion designs of someone else’s garment can be lauded as genius in fashion, but condemned as piracy in other creative fields? Much of the answer seems to lie in the willingness of fashion companies to acknowledge the larger ecology of innovation — a frame of analysis that traditional copyright law omits. Intellectual property law tends to ignore the fact that creativity in real life must germinate within communities of practice and creative traditions — and that privatizing those communities and traditions only diminishes the feedstock of future creativity. Rare among creative sectors, fashion frankly acknowledges that there is little that is wholly original or unprecedented. Timing and context are at least as important as the originality that a designer contributes. some of the leading works in this emerging arena. The bibliography also includes works about the relationship of fashion to the entertainment industry. Some of the most exciting insights about fashion and creativity emerged from the “Ready to Share” conference itself, which was funded in part by a generous gift from the Center for the Public Domain and sponsored by The Fashion Institute for Design & Merchandising/FIDM. Included with this book is a stand-alone DVD. The video incorporates highlights of the conference — including comments by producer Norman Lear, designer Tom Ford, New York Times reporter Guy Trebay, Sex and the City creator Michael Patrick King all creative endeavors. history and congressional statutes, this article is a primer and recording artist Danger Mouse — with a walking tour of in the legal treatment of creativity in fashion. The authors In the final essay, “Music & Fashion: The Balancing Act New York fashion. Hosted by journalist Rick Karr with special This naturally led us to wonder — how can an industry built upon open borrowing and re-use of other people’s work thrive financially? Doesn’t this contradict one of the core premises of the traditional narrative for intellectual property — that strict property rights are critical in order to reward creators for coming up with new works and selling them in the marketplace? We conclude that a complex matrix of factors affects creativity and economic sustainability in fashion. Intellectual property rights, including copyright and trademark protec- explain why fashion design generally is not protectable under copyright law, design patent, trademark or trade dress law. A second essay, “Ready to Share: Creativity in Fashion & Digital Culture,” by David Bollier and Laurie Racine, senior fellows at the Norman Lear Center, builds on the first piece by looking at the social and intergenerational dynamics of creativity in fashion, and how shared traditions and designs play an indispensable role in driving new creativity. 1. Norman Lear and Michael Patrick King discuss the impact of intellectual property restrictions on specific creative decisions in their TV shows. 2. FIDM’s Barbara Bundy highlights the energy of the conference. Between Creativity and Control,” Aram Sinnreich and Marissa Gluck, two former research analysts for Jupiter Research, explore the fascinating parallels and differences between creativity in music and fashion. The culture of fashion is far more accepting of appropriation and imitation than the music industry, which relies upon strict copyright protection and fierce litigation to prevent the smallest forms of unauthorized copying. Since we believe the topic of creativity and ownership in the fashion industry deserves greater scrutiny, this volume guest, David Wolfe, Creative Director of the Doneger Group, we interweave an on-the-ground look at fashion with the “Ready to Share” conference themes. David Wolfe, one of the industry’s foremost trend forecasters, exposed fashion as a kind of “fragile ecosystem” of styles and motifs, tracing some of the significant historical shifts in fashion design and markets over the past 75 years. Tom Ford’s illuminating conversation with New York Times reporter Guy Trebay centered on whether fashion is deriva- tion, are certainly important in spurring creativity. But many The authors wonder why the “borrowing” that is considered includes an annotated bibliography prepared by Norman tive at its core or an original art form. Using examples from social, technological and historical elements also affect how standard practice in fashion should be denounced as “theft” Lear Center researcher Patrick Reed. The wealth of articles various designers, Ford and Trebay talked about the neces- creativity unfolds and circulates. One of the most important when it occurs in music or film. How is it that sampling the and books listed in this far-ranging bibliography features sity of personal interpretations, and brand identity and its page 11
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