Fashion law

Fashion law is a specialized area of law that deals with intellectual property (copyright and trademark law), business law, licensing, textiles, merchandising, and sometimes customs (import/export issues). Traditionally, most fashion lawyers work for established fashion and luxury goods companies in major urban commercial centers such as New York City, Paris, London and Milan. Some fashion lawyers work within the company, and others work outside the company for law firms.

Fashion Law is a quickly growing legal specialty, and several American law and design schools have dedicated clinics and courses to its study. In a 2008 article, Susan Scafidi, the first U.S. law professor ever to offer a course in Fashion Law and later Director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham Law, wrote that Fashion law was only then starting to be recognized as a distinct field. The field largely grew out of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Samara Bros., Inc. (529 U.S. 205 (2000)), which held that a product’s design is distinctive, and therefore protectible, only upon a showing of secondary meaning (i.e., marks whose primary significance, in the minds of the public, is to identify the product’s source rather than the product itself. Deborah McNamara at Parsons The New School for Design, and Guillermo Jimenez at the Fashion Institute of Technology at the State University of New York, also offer courses in Fashion Law.

Fashion attorneys participate in a variety of legal activities and negotiate deals for their clients. The clients may be large retail chains, haute couture labels, high-fashion models, or an unknown designers just starting out. If and when the situation arises, a fashion attorney will litigate for his or her clients in court.

Fashion houses and accessory designers both face unique challenges specific to their industry. They require attorneys who understand the nature of short seasons and ever-changing product cycles, pressures surrounding counterfeit goods, and the issues of unfair competition. Valuable assets in the fashion business consist of not only intellectual property rights, but also trade arrangements, contracts, and information technology systems. A fashion attorney's career success may depend on being able to effectively protect these assets by delivering industry-specific legal advice tailored to the clients' needs.