Children and fashion: contextualizing issues, changing times

  There are three interlinked issues that need to be examined before starting to analyse the primary data that have been collected with children themselves.2 These are: contemporary consumer culture and its obsession with celebrity, the children’s wear market and its transition from traditional children’s clothing to more adultlike styling, and the status of the ‘tweenager’ as a significant social actor and consuming force.

Fashion Design : The Paradox and the Public Domain

Fashion Design

  Although some scholars argue that today fashion design should be protected under intellectual property rights, some scholars make arguments that the protection of fashion design is meaningless. Only in an environment of weak IP protection of fashion design, the public domain can be extended. One of the most famous arguments is called “piracy paradox”.

A. Piracy Paradox Theory and Fashion Design

  Since the born of intellectual property rights, it has been developing with balancing the private rights and public interests. However, usually it is hardly to find a proper balance point between the private rights and public interests in practice. Piracy Paradox argues that scholars shall pay more attention to the public interests and less attention to the private rights to fashion design protection. In other way, “[w]eaken individual designers and strengthen the industry and drives its evolution.”

Fashion Design : Property View of Fashion Design

Fashion Design

  Is fashion design property? We mentioned the fashion industry is a profitable business, which annually earns hundreds of billions of dollars. However, such fact cannot directly prove that fashion design is property. Property is considered the most fundamental of real rights; an owner of a property has a right to use, benefit, transfer or sell the property, and a right to exclude others from doing these things to the property. Property implies the right to complete control of the good. Property rights are not defined as relations between men and things, but behavioural relations among men that arise from the existence of things. The property right is the set of economic and social relations with respect to the utilization of scarce resources. So here comes the question, are fashion design scarce resources which need to be protected as the property right?

  Scarcity is explicitly the rationale for modern law and economics. Scarcity is a problem generated between unlimited human wants and limited resources. There are two kinds of scarcity: natural scarcity and artificial scarcity . Nowadays, people need almost uninterrupted new fashion design. Meanwhile, there are a limited number of designers could spend limited time and mental works to create limited new fashion design. There is an artificial scarcity that exists in the  fashion design.