Paper short abstract:

In the postmodern bluring of ‘original’ designer fashion, street style, and ‘ethnic dress’ can fashion designers claim legal ownership of their work through copyrighting fashion designs or are their works always style elements in the public domain?

Paper long abstract:

It is customary in European cultures to identify works of art and design as creations that spring from the imagination of named individuals, and are therefore taken to constitute their own personal property. This assumption grounds a claim to ownership of copyright in law, the capacity to control the terms and conditions under which the image or object may be reproduced. In an increasingly extensive global fashion market there are issues here of authenticity, originality, and ownership in an industry which demonstrates increasing economic significance. In this paper I argue that the distinctions between 'original' designer fashion, street style, and 'ethnic dress' are irretrievably blurred in the 'original' garments of designer fashion. I look at what it means to claim ownership of fashion when themed collections and individual designs are in fact assemblages of diverse elements of (often) unnamed origin drawn from a style vocabulary of multiple sources and influences. I question whether, in the postmodern, self-conscious discourse of fashion as an irrational and self-referential recycling of image and message in the free play of consumer style, fashion designs are inevitably and always in the public domain? If they are indeed a communal resource, freely available for emulation, adaptation, mutation, and appropriation then they share the nature of those artefacts of non-European cultures that are commonly understood as collective representations that exist outside the protections provided by copyright laws. Finally I explore the implications of these propositions for the possibility of claiming legal protection for 'ownership' of individual designs.