Fashion Trumps All in Sandal Scandal, Speech Breach
Putting the Fringe Back into Copyright Infringement
During last week’s Melania-Meredith-Michelle-mixup-madness, many pundits said Meredith McIver was covering for Melania Trump — and one suggested she probably didn’t even realize that plagiarism was wrong when she lifted from Michelle Obama’s speech.
This idea that she might have no idea that it was wrong brought to mind a memory, a lunchtime years ago when I eavesdropped on a café table of plagiarists. To my amazement, there were three of them talking loudly in great detail about what, where, and how to copy the original work of others. They had sketches with them because they worked in the fashion industry, an industry Melania inhabited for years as a model.
As I thought more about her background, it made so much sense that she might casually lift someone else’s painstakingly woven phrases. And when I say her background I don’t mean her lack of higher formal education, or her lack of political background, but her actual education and experience. Here’s a woman who grew up under communism, with perhaps slightly different ideas of private property than Americans might have. Then she went on to work in an industry where piracy is rampant. You like a design, you have it copied — you wear your own version of it or sell it it others at a discount. Sure it’s nice to put your original stamp on it. But if something is working, you borrow it. Whole mini-industries within the fashion industry have sprung up around piracy.
Of course it’s also illegal. But it’s not always prosecuted. Most fashionistas can recognize knockoffs when they see them, but not every one is worth pursuing down legal runways. For some, it is a livelihood, a large-scale operation whose operators realize they are on the margins of the law while potentially, um, skirting the moral issues. Fashion breeds trends, so at times everyone is making very similar things, and some design houses even expect a little bit of emulation.
But there are also cases of copyright infringement. And reading up a little about the subject, I discovered to my amazement that there is another member of the Trump family who is now being sued for copyright infringement. For infringing upon a shoe. (And for putting fringes on the shoe, as well as a pompom sort of thing.) Oddly, it’s the eloquent Ivanka Trump, quite original in her speechifying but allegedly less so in her shoe-designing. You can read more about this problem in British Vogue, but here is their image of both shoes side by side:
Experts have said that the odds of the two identical passages in the spousal convention speeches being coincidentally identical are over one in a trillion. They have not weighed in on the odds of these shoes being coincidentally the same shoe. In Ivanka’s defense, her shoe looks kind of the same but a bit more painful to wear, with less arch support. The folks suing her at the Aquazzura label call their sandal “Wild Thing,” but Ivanka’s sandal has a more Republican name, “The Hettie.” She does know her brand.
Meanwhile, after giving her original speech, Ivanka sold a bunch of similar dresses for her label and promised that one even more like the dress she was wearing would be available in the fall.
One wonders how the winds of political change might impact the fate of the blush-toned sheath. As election prognosticators know, a lot could happen by fall.
It is tempting to avoid discussing fashion in our discussion of campaign issues because it appears irrelevant and silly — until it isn’t. This potential first lady and first daughter both travailed in that world, as models and more. And our potential president seems to care a lot about what is trending.
I don’t mean we should ask the candidates who they are wearing. I mean we need to consider the mindset of those who labor in the fashion universe, and more profoundly who dwell in that universe, and ask ourselves what mentality they might be bringing to the political landscape.
