Journal Articles

“Slower-Fashion”: Towards an International Copyright Framework for Fashion Design Protection

Every season, fast-fashion retailers such as H&M, Boohoo, and Express offer inexpensive replicas based on original design works on the runway. Such blatant piracy can be perfectly legal. By exploiting the loopholes in the current structure and substance of American Copyright law, fast-fashion copyists have been accumulating billions in revenues. Emerging designers, on the other hand, are losing orders and risking having their entire careers erased. Fashion design piracy poses more than a local, copyright infringement problem — design piracy not only hurts young designers’ motivation to innovate, it also has catastrophic environmental impacts and poses risks for human rights violations in hazardous sweatshops located in developing nations.

            This Note aims to analyze the landscape of U.S. copyright protection for fashion designs through examining procedural and substantive issues in district court cases that came after a landmark Supreme Court decision, to provide a comparison of high and low-IP protection paradigms, and to assert that an international cooperation paradigm against design piracy is warranted.