• Michelle Obama may have skipped the CFDAs, but she'll celebrate the National Design Awards at the White House on July 24. The winners, chosen by the Smithsonian and including Francisco Costa, will participate in events around Washington. [WWD]

• The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case involving Chicago apparel manufacturer American Needle and the National Football League. American Needle contends that the league ran afoul of antitrust laws when its 32 teams canceled their individual apparel licenses to manufacture exclusively with Reebok in 2001; the NHL says that it is, in fact, a single entity entitled to do business with whomever it likes. [Breitbart]
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection had a banner week, seizing $10 million worth of counterfeit goods. Six different intercepted shipments included fake Nike sneakers, fake Coach bags, fake Gucci shoes, and fake Louis Vuitton purses. [WWD]
• Victoria Beckham is bringing in an all-new team to design and produce her dVb denim line ahead of its relaunch, expected for next year. "Victoria makes out she's hands-on, but she doesn't sit there cutting patterns," explains an anonymous friend. Not that there was much misunderstanding on that count. [Daily Mail]
• Ed Westwick — from that show about high schoolers with credit cards — posed for K Swiss shoes, and boy does he talk about the experience as one itching to be re-hired! "They know who they are," the actor said of the company, before casually mentioning that he'd just love to do another campaign. [WWD]
• Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy talked to New York about his Spring 09 couture collection, and his just-presented Resort 09 collection. Tisci, who ascended to his position five years ago, at the age of 28, calls himself the youngest couturier in history, despite the fact that both Yves Saint Laurent, who took the reins at Christian Dior at the age of 21, and Hubert de Givenchy himself, who founded his namesake line at 25 back in 1952, were younger. [The Cut]
• Model Chanel Iman's inability to distinguish between "their" and "there" has not hampered her ability to snag an internship at Teen Vogue. In a sweet touch of near-authenticity, the Condé Nasties had her clean out the styling closet. [Twitter]
• Urban Outfitters now sells its clothes via mobile phone, for those occasions when you yearn to smell of Vincent Gallo's ballsweat and early 90s desperation, but can't find your way to a store or a computer. [WWD]
• Of course American Apparel would market its new bedding with a bunch of "Oh hai Dov, this your bed? Tee hee!" shots. [AmApp]
• In other news of products that signal the apocalypse, you can now buy an Oscar de la Renta dress for your three-year-old. [W]
• These fashion-show-throwing Manhattan middle schoolers, on the other hand, seem self-sufficient enough to never be heard wailing, "But Mommy I want an Oscar noooooooow!" [Reuters]
• Valentino's owner, the U.K. private-equity firm Permira, is in talks with the fashion house's primary creditors to relax the terms of its €2.5 billion debt. Permira bought Valentino for €5.3 billion in 2007, when such buy-outs — and the easy credit they were financed with — were common. Head designer Valentino Garavani retired within months of the deal, and the house has struggled to express a coherent creative vision since his departure. [ToL]
• Madonna's wholesale transformation of her boy-toy, Jesus Luz, into a real runway model is proceeding apace. After his exclusive appearance on the Dolce & Gabbana runway for Milan's men's wear week, he headed to Paris — unburdened by any exclusive deal — and promptly racked up a spot in Givenchy's lineup. His outfit included studded gladiator sandals, harem pants, and a very busy floral/plaid shirt. [The Cut]
• Esteban Cortazar and Mounir Moufarrige, the C.E.O. of the house of Ungaro, continue to do the will-they-won't-they dance around rumors of designer Cortazar's departure. Cortazar was at the Ungaro men's wear show in Paris and, when asked about his differences with management, said "For now I am here." Moufarrige, for his part, when asked if he would be retaining Cortazar's services into the future, said, "He's here," and pointed at the runway. [WWD]
• The rumor that Pierre Cardin's Chinese shoe and leather goods licensee was in talks to take over the French brand outright has been denied by both Pierre Cardin and the shoemaker. [Reuters]
• American retailers just can't catch a break. If it's not the recession, the rising unemployment rate, or the precipitous drop in consumer spending, it's the risk of tornadoes and unseasonal torrential rain keeping the customers from their stores. [WWD]
• Versace saw a 13.4% decline in revenue during the first quarter of this year, but its sales results were stronger during the months of May and June, company chairman Santo Versace reported. [Reuters]
• Maybe part of the reason that Aéropostale is outperforming competitors like Abercrombie & Fitch to such a large degree is due to the fact that the company spends 80% of its marketing budget online, online being where most of its customers are? [WWD]

This is a "Parrot" jacket, by East West Musical Instruments, the misleadingly-named San Francisco-based specialty leather goods company that operated in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Notice how the patchwork leather on the shoulders and collar almost looks like two parrots in profile, their heads bent around the wearer's neck.

East West Musical Instruments specialized in intricately pieced jackets, and sold to the likes of Janis Joplin, Iggy Pop, and John Bonham; New York's hipster mayor, John Lindsay, even had one. These days, an East West jacket can sell for $1,000-$5,000 on eBay or at auction.

Which brings us to this jacket, presented this Monday in New York as part of Balenciaga's 2010 Resort collection.

Other bloggers have already taken note of this jacket's strong resemblance to the East West offering above.

It's not the first time Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar of 70s American rock 'n' roll style. In Ghesquière's Spring, 2002, ready-to-wear collection, then Hintmag intern (and current anti-comfort activist) Sameer Reddy noticed striking similarities between Ghesquière's patchwork collection and the work of San Francisco designer Kaisik Wong, because he just happened to be looking through a book of Wong's work at the right moment. Similarities down to the placement of tassels and the shape of the patches.




Balenciaga Spring 2002



Kaisik Wong

Ghesquière admitted his pilfering to Cathy Horyn at the New York Times, telling her "I did it — yes." Unabashed, the designer even said, "I'm very flattered that people are looking at my sources of inspiration."

In this case, Ghesquière is not the only person looking to East West Musical Instruments for "inspiration." Urban Outfitters' Pins & Needles brand, which states clearly on its website that it "takes inspiration from a broad range of exquisite vintage and costume pieces, dating from early 19th to mid 20th century," copied the "Parrot" jacket earlier this year. (Its $298 version is now sold out.)



But Balenciaga, a high-fashion brand currently owned by the multinational PPR, and which acts swiftly when its own copyrights are infringed (for example with the much-copied Balenciaga "Motorcycle" bag), makes no such admission. Balenciaga posits itself as far more than mere knock-offs of vintage items; it's a fashion house that makes some claim to the originality of its designs — "inspiration" aside, when a designer of Ghesquière's talents is involved, you expect him to do his own work.

Or do you? Some would argue that, in our post-modern, post-Warhol, post-Grey Album age, that copying is no big deal. (This is not the view Balenciaga takes as regards its purses, but it is what some people say. Harold Koda, the curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said Ghesquière's copy of Wong's work was an example of the Belgian "just rummaging through extant material culture and juxtaposing it with other things to create something different.") Some even argue that knock-offs force source designers to design more, and design better. And the fact that the East West Musical Instruments is extinct could, to some, seem like an excuse for the copy — and the Balenciaga jacket, with its only slightly adapted collar, is certainly a copy. If a book is out of print and unable to be obtained, in a way it seems only fair for someone else to republish it. But that person really ought, in good conscience, to leave the original author's name on the manuscript.

American fashion designers are currently pushing, via the Design Piracy Act, for the inclusion of their intellectual property under the umbrella of copyright law. They argue that their original ideas are currently too easy fodder for knock-off artists like Forever 21 (who had a very near miss, via hung jury, on a copyright case brought by Trovata earlier this year) and the many, many other brands who take prints, patterns, and other design features directly from the runway without acknowledgment or apology. A high-end designer getting caught stealing from someone else's archives — again — can't but hurt that case.

Balenciaga's Nicholas Ghesquire Copies Again [Addicted to YSL]
East West Musical Instruments Parrot Jacket XS [Goodbyeheart]
Is Copying Really a Part of the Creative Process? [NYTimes]

Writes Jennifer 8. Lee for the New York Times' City Room blog,

In one of his studies, half of the 250 subjects were told that the designer glasses they were wearing were "real," while the other half were told they were wearing "counterfeits." They were told to do a number of tasks that seemed to be related to the glasses, like evaluating scenery. But tucked into the sequence was a math test. Researchers found that 60 percent of those who were wearing "counterfeit" glasses cheated, while only 20 percent of those wearing "real" glasses cheated.

Study participants also were given a financial incentive to lie about the location of circles in a series of visual puzzles — and those with the "fake" glasses lied both sooner and more often.

The Times draws the conclusion that buying counterfeit goods has a discernible corrosive effect on an individual's morality — that, in effect, wearing an item you know to be fake is like kryptonite for your sense of right and wrong. But can it really be that simple?

I don't question that wearing branded or luxury items makes us feel a certain way: maybe smarter, perhaps more put-together, more attractive, possibly more comfortable. Some of that is the result of thoughtful design — a fabric with a superior hand against your skin, a more flattering cut greeting your glances in the mirror, a better quality of embellishment, hand-sewn details, a secret silk lining in a daring color only you know about. But a great part of our emotional reaction to brands is the sole result of calculated marketing decisions and the tide of logo-infected imagery that's washed over us all since birth. (Which conditioned response is, weirdly enough, what Ariely's study considers "real.")

Ariely also seems to have lacked a control group. No research subjects were asked to complete the honesty-testing tasks while wearing sunglasses whose brand-status was not stated, or while wearing no sunglasses at all. Having essentially no baseline for comparison makes the results suspect; unless we know how often "average" people will cheat at mathematics or lie for low-stakes financial gain under identical conditions, there's no real way to know if people wearing branded items they believe to be counterfeit or real lie and cheat more or less often.

But most importantly, in real life people are not randomly assigned authentic or copied goods — they choose to buy them. And what motivates those choices more than wealth? The segment of the population who can actually choose to buy a real Birkin (price range lower limit: $6000, according to a Forbes article from last August that quotes a luxury goods marketeer thus: "People want to spend their money on frivolous things") is vanishingly small. The market for the $100 Chinatown version is increasingly well-stocked. How utterly insulting that a study should come along effectively to congratulate the tiny segment of the population who can afford authentic luxury items on being not only more financially successful than the rest of us, but more moral. Except I'm pretty sure Bernie Madoff's Cartier wristwatches were real.

This isn't to say that counterfeiting is a business worth supporting. It's a wretched concern for any number of reasons. In addition to the obvious wrong of stealing someone else's intellectual property, it defrauds the nation of tax revenue, and large-scale counterfeiting rings are often involved in drug smuggling and other, more serious forms of organized crime. Designer copies are also frequently made by child laborers in sweatshop conditions. But do we really need to be told — by a researcher who presented his findings at a conference sponsored by no less an interested party than Harper's Bazaar — that carrying a bag we know to be cheap tat made in lamentable conditions will make us cheat and deceive those around us?

Ariely gave the thank-you Prada bag to his mother. But, like so many of us, once he'd known that special feeling of owning something "genuine" and "real" (whether or not what that mainly means is merely really, really expensive), he couldn't stop. Ariely bought a Mont Blanc pen. (Starting price: in the hundreds.)

"When I take it out and I start writing, I have this objective feeling that my thoughts are clearer. My handwriting is clearer," he says. "The truth is — I didn't anticipate it — when I take this pen, there is a special feeling."

After a lifetime lived without "fashion products," a conference sponsored by a leading ladymag ruined the good professor for anything else. If there's a lesson in that, it's not that fakes are only bought by sneaky cheating crass folk, and the real deal is always carried by upstanding citizens.

[Image via Flickr user Janoid]

The Moral Costs Of Counterfeiting [NY Times]

Related:
World's Most Extravagant Handbags [Forbes]