If you are one of many, you might have fallen in love with our “I Eat Style” photoshoot from issue ten. If you are one of few, you might be able to fit into the size 5.5 teal heels modeled by Van Le, above. The shoot’s art director, Stephanie Herold, says she found them at a vintage store right before the shoot in the exact colour and size she was looking for. (”That’s how I think Jesus shows he loves me.” - Stef).

We are giving away these kicks to one lucky WORN reader. All you have to do to win is… have tiny feet. The first reader to reply to this post who wears a size 5.5 gets ‘em. That’s it, really. (Of course, if you wanted to brighten up this Monday morning, you could also tell us the outfit you plan to wear them with, and maybe throw in a knock knock joke or two, but we’ll give them to the first entrant regardless).

Tally ho!

Left: Diane Von Furstenburg [Spring 20089], Right: Mercy [Spring 2008]. Photo Source

On August 5th, Senator Charles E. Schumer proposed the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act (IDPPPA) which aims to protect American fashion designers from uncanny knock-offs for three years. In an industry driven by trends, which quite often lead to countless copies of original designs, this plucky little bill is aimed to specifically protect innovative and original garments and is actually expected to pass this fall.

The IDPPPA places the onus on fashion designers to prove in a legal action that they created “a unique, distinguishable, non-trivial and non-utilitarian variation over prior designs,” worthy of being protected. This presumes of course that the designer becomes aware of the copied apparel, shoes, sunglasses etc. and pursues legal action, instead of relying on a sort of fashion police. The Bill has the support of the American Apparel & Footwear Association (AAFA) and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA).

My favourite case of this kind of alleged design theft in Canada was the affair of the bedroom jacket, originally designed by boutique Canadian label Mercy, and then substantively copied by the Diane Von Furtsenburg label [both pictured above]. Nathalie Atkinson of the National Post scooped this story last year after spotting the Mercy jacket in Lucky and the DvF in Teen Vogue. From the shredded silk sash bow, to the inner drawstring and pin tucks on the sleeve, DvF’s jacket was identical to Mercy’s. A bill like this might have made DvF pay up, jurisdiction issues considered.

The Canadian Copyright Act does not currently pack much punch when it comes to protecting designers against the ubiquitous na-na-na-boo-boo-ing copycat. Clothing, deemed “useful articles” can be copied without penalty if the original copyright holder produces 51 articles or more of the design. Trademark works are protected under section 64 (3), as well as textiles elegantly defined as “material that has a woven or knitted pattern that is suitable for piece goods or the making of wearing apparel.” The Industrial Design Act will protect a fashion designer’s work if she registers the non-practical, artistic elements of her clothing before it has circulated in public for a year.

Perhaps the most interesting take away from the IDPPPA is the effect of potentially forcing fashion designers to be more inventive. The caveat, however, is obvious - how could the fashion industry, full of Prado wallets, and regretful trends like the harem pant ever move forward? I guess it would just have to. No longer would horrible knock-offs of that vintage Valentino dress that Julia Roberts wore to the Oscars be acceptable (I saw this as a child and puked a bit in my precocious fashion palate. There were no monsters in the closet, just bad replicas). Very specific designs would be inaccessible, and thus maybe stores like Forever 21 (sued, ironically, by DvF), H&M and Zara would have a few more novel handbags.

Isn’t this what fashion is about, moving forward unrelentingly? Thank-you Mr. Schumer on behalf of the cool, new shoes that I haven’t even bought yet.

- Stephanie Herold

Further Reading
Counterfeit Chic Blog
Does Fashion Need Copyright Protection? By Amanda Branch

Previously
Stealing Beauty

I’ve never been much for sneakers. I often visit my neighborhood and surrounding area shoe lockers just to yawn at the same design I saw occupying the shelf four years ago, but in a different colour or with some celebrity or athlete’s name on it. I began to see the error in my ways when I picked up Art & Sole, written and designed by Intercity.

Intercity’s “sneakers” are sports shoes originally intended for basketball, skateboarding or just strolling, elevated to their own subculture by the skateboarding and hip-hop style phenomena. This detailed and up-to-date sneaker art history features oodles of Nikes, as well as other famous labels including Vans, New Balance, and Onitsuka Tiger. Lesser-known labels like Madfoot!, JB Classics and The Quiet Life also make an appearance.

The book is divided into halves: Sneakers & Art looks at collaborations and projects, while Art & Sneakers is composed of sneaker art, publications, exhibitions and toys, all sneaker-themed. Among the toys featured were Swiss design collective +41’s mini chocolate kicks crafted to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Air Force 1 and Takara Tomy’s Nike Transformer dolls, oscillating between toy-shoes and toy-toys.

So by this point you can imagine that this book has a few more tricks to offer than your average sneaker stand. It showed me about 200 pages of shoes and shoe art I’d never seen before. Great. But, what the volume does meaningfully through its pages and pages of sculpture and obscure sneakers is bring out the artfulness in the sneakers themselves; even if, like me, you don’t really care very much about how limited your editions are or whether they are made of chocolate, this book will teach you about who makes these sneakers, and why these everyday masterpieces have become so collectible. And I don’t need to have a room full of runners in Plexiglas backlit cases to appreciate that.

For example, in a handy two-paragraph gloss, I learned about a sneaker I don’t think I’ll easily find in the suburbs, FEIYUE (pronounced stop-living-in-a-bedroom community-with-little-commercial-variety), a name as vague and hard to enunciate as an Ikea cabinet’s. These shoes were actually invented in the 1920s in Shanghai, and were favored by martial artists for their “flexibility and comfort.” French collective Seven Dice designs FEIYUEs, limiting them to only two styles, high and low top. Clearly, these shoes are kind of special.

And that’s the effect of this book. Sneakers with seemingly little material difference to the layman’s eye are given two pages of close-ups, and suddenly they hold their own unique place in a wonderful sneaker gallery. No longer are the shoes simply special or noticeable to those who collect or obsess over them, but even the kitten heel connoisseur is given some insight into why some people go so bonkers over sneakers (the people who do go bonkers over sneakers will probably relish this book for its obscure detail and inspiring objects). That seems to be the art of Intercity, exposing the story and creative value behind something we might never have looked at so closely. Apparently mundane, everyday objects become art. It happened to Greek vases. Why not kicks?

Art and Sole by Nathan Gale (Laurence King Publishers, 2008)
review by Stephanie Herold
photography by Ave Smith

Bonnie English wants to teach you Fashion 101 (minus the student fees and late night study sessions) and she aims to “unravel the complications and contradictions behind stylistic change in order to chart the history of modern fashion.”

A senior lecturer in Art Theory at the Queensland College of Art, English has created a very respectable academic treatment of the last century of fashion. She begins her narrative with Louis XIV, predecessor of metrosexuals everywhere, and extends her analysis into globalized contemporary fashion, with everything from Comme des Garçons to Laura Ashley prints in between. What is most notable about the content of this volume is the way English handles her broad topic; there are some powerful fashion images in this book, but this is no pretty coffee table accessory. English selects unique subjects within fashion for each chapter and zeroes in to prevent a deluge of meaningless and broad historical summaries.

“Swimsuits” by Sonia Delaunay (1928)

Exemplary are musings on Russian Dadaist visual artists and fashion designers Delaunay, Popova, and Stepanova. While they’re not an obvious point of interest within the history of costume, English creates a fashion tradition citing these women as Viktor and Rolf’s Neo-Dadaist forerunners, describing how they brought abstract designs into homes before abstract artists did. In short, English finds specific, and sometimes obscure, moments in dress, and writes her own fashion history canon.

The only real downside of the author’s scholarly style is that her astute dryness might be mistaken for condescension: she writes, “Perfume literally provides a touch of luxury to the mundane life of a middle-class consumer.” Her snooty phrasing is a minor sin, however, considering she pays tribute to the authors and inventors of even the most mundane paraphernalia; apparently my bean bag chair was designed by Gatti, Teodoro, and Paolini in 1968. As well, English makes some impressive connections by ascribing new meaning to common garments. For example, a t-shirt is aligned with “the quest to define ‘self’ amongst postmodernist youth culture.” Chanel is recognized for her methods “to achieve a greater ‘democratization’ of fashion” and Mary Quant’s mini-skirt is indicted as systematically “exclud[ing] older and larger women from being entirely fashionable.”

Mary Quant’s mini-skirts and mod designs.

In A Cultural History of Fashion, English treats fashion as a thoughtful art form. She bases her book on the premise that, “arguably, all fashion is not art, but on occasion it can become art.” It is because of this stance that she can earnestly confront fashion as a deliberate act of design rather than a trendy accident… like jelly sandals. The triumph of the book is its ability to educate people about fashion in broad terms, infusing a renewed curiosity into this sometimes neglected or even dismissed scholarly discipline. I give it an A+.

A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th Century by Bonnie English (Berg, 2007)
reviewed by Stephanie Herold.