Commercial Cultural Appropriation
Part 1. Fashion, intellectual property, and human rights
Cultural appropriation for financial gain is a hot topic when it comes to the fashion industry’s problematic practices. There have been numerous instances where brands have copied clothing articles deemed as ethnic, where they haven’t collaborated, shared any of the profits, or even given acknowledgment to people who originated those designs. Often these designs have messages and purposes that might be difficult to understand for a western person since our clothes and clothing choices are often washed entirely from cultural meaning
Issues of commercial exploitation of traditional knowledge and cultural expressions are difficult to tackle effectively with human rights law, even though international law instruments have been drafted for this purpose. There have been cases where multinational enterprises have even patented innovations that originate from tribal groups for themselves.
These have often been related to knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants. There is, however, a case that I’ll get to later, where a fashion label tried to claim, in court, ownership of a design that was taken from a group of people in Mexico and originated from their traditional knowledge and cultural expression. Taking monetary gain from cultural knowledge that the profiteer did not develop nor participate in is clearly unfair, but there is a lack of effective mechanisms to prohibit it.
The breach that happens when intangible property is copied from tribal-, indigenous- or other culturally uniform groups of peoples is not solely about the monetary gain. The issue with many of the cases lies in the lack of respect, knowledge, and discretion. If the garments and patterns that are copied have deeper meanings to the groups from which they originate, they might get easily used in ways and contexts that can be offending. The groups can suffer from both economic deficiency and emotional hardship.[1]
One of the contemporary incidents where copying was blatantly obvious would be with Dior and the people who reside in the county of Bihor in Romania. Dior’s pre-fall collection of 2017 included a vest and two other garments that bore striking similarities with very detailed folk vests and coats worn by the people of Bihor. There had been no mention of the origin of the designs, even though the carefully detailed garments were apparent copies. The price tag on one of Dior’s versions was 30,000 US dollars.
Once Dior’s copying was found out and pointed out in the media, a campaign for authentic Bihor artisanal clothing was launched, and an online store was set up in an attempt to use the attention from the incident to channel some of the cash flow for the people who originated the garments.
Around the same time, Dior had copied an Indian print from a small designer from People Tree. The print was recognizable, detailed, and had been in production already for ten years when the counterfeit print appeared in Dior’s clothing, so there was no room for a possibility of coincident or accidental forgery. The case with People Tree was settled for an undisclosed sum of money and never went to court.
Dior has not been the only design house that has been appropriating Romanian clothing designs without giving credit. In the same year as Dior’s Bihor copying took place, US designer Tory Burch reproduced another traditional Romanian coat. The brand marketed the coat as being inspired by African culture. Romanian people were understandably outraged by this cultural misrepresentation, and the description was soon changed. The coat was almost an exact copy of a traditional coat that was exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A couple of years earlier, in 2011, singer Adele was photographed on the cover of Vogue, wearing a blouse by Tom Ford. This blouse had also been copied from a traditional Romanian design. The Romanian peasant blouse, which had obviously inspired the design, was never mentioned in connection to the design.
Monica Boța Moisin, a lawyer who specializes in cultural intellectual property law, and is from the Bihor region of Romania, saw the Tom Ford design, which to her was familiar from her own culture. This later factored in with her decision to focus on helping artisans and communities to promote their traditional designs. She had found it baffling that the Tom Ford label had given no credit for the culture that it had drawn the design from and the fact that it was even possible to commercialize a design that was so important to a cultural identity of a community and just fix it with a brand label. She has noticed how the ‘ethnic’ looks that flood the fashion industry’s retail and catwalks have transformed from merely taking inspiration or giving homage to the point of becoming exploitative. By exploitative, she means that the profits from designs are all going to the design houses. Often even credit is not given, and the origin is rarely acknowledged.
In Romanian culture, traditional clothes are used to tell a narrative. The traditional blouse and its patterns and white spaces are designed to tell a story through symbols and to define features, like the region where a person is from or what community they belong to. It carries significant segments of the history of the local peasant culture.
The emergence of Romanian clothing styles into a global fashion inspired members of Romanian civic society to establish an online community, La blouse Roumaine, to promote and spread awareness of the Romanian blouse. This soon led to the launching of an online campaign #GiveCredit, which was meant to reach out to Dior so that the label would acknowledge the plagiarism of the Romanian garments. The campaign spread when people would take pictures of themselves in traditional clothing with the hashtag.
Read the second part here.
[1] Brown, Michael F: Who Owns Native Culture? Harvard University Press 2003 (Brown 2003)
