Fashion

  Fashion refers to “anything that is the current trend in look and dress up of a person”, especially in clothing, foot wear and accessories. Nowadays, fashion surrounds our daily life and work. What we wear is a means to express ourselves instead of merely protecting people from cold and nakedness. Fashion design is products relates to aesthetic appeal or innovative ornamentation and it is the centre of the fashion industry. Fashion industry is no longer just refers to a garment or a pair of shoes, today the fashion industry is a business which earns more than two hundred billion dollar per year



  Fashion design is a creation made by humans. Meanwhile, fashion design is different from other human creations protected under intellectual property law because the short life cycle and minor differences of the product of fashion design. Because of the fast broadcast of the internet in the digital age, imitators are much easier to take a “free ride” on the creative fashion design, sometimes even before the original fashion products went onto the market. Meanwhile, fashion design is not protected under intellectual property rights and lacks IP protection. Therefore, there is a loophole for the fashion design protection in the legal system. As a creation of human beings, should we protect fashion design? Should we protect fashion design under IP law? What kind of intellectual property right should we choose to protect fashion design-- under patent, trademark or copyright? Protecting the fashion design, to be or not to be, that is the question.

Labor-Dessert Theory


  Lockean’s labor theory states that "when a creator deliberately combines her mental efforts with language, images, techniques, or other ideas in the public domain, the resulting product should be identified as her intellectual property. "According to Lockean’s theory, fashion designers combine their mental effort with images and original design in the public domain and make a new design. Therefore, the designers have a right to possess the fashion design made by themselves and enjoy intellectual property protection for their creative mental works.


  However, the creativity in fashion design is different from other traditional creations in copyright or patent. The creativity in fashion design is relatively small. For example, cutting the length of a skirt, adding sleeves to a T-shirt, or using different patterns for the textile can be treated as a new creation of a fashion design. Fashion designers seemingly spend less labor compared with the inventors of copyright and patent. In the Lockean approach, mixing an unowned but ownable goods with one’s labor is considered an extension of the individual self and treated as a moral project. However, should we consider the level of creativity here and decide whether fashion design should be protected under intellectual property law?