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New Exhibit
Those who complain about fast-fashion chains knocking off designers often
speak of it as a recent phenomenon. But as any fashion-history buff knows,
counterfeiting has been happening since long before Zara was a gleam in anyone's
eye. As early as the 18th century, diamond jewelry was imitated with paste; by
the early 1900s, American department-store employees were invading Paris Fashion
Week and covertly sketching the designs coming down the runway, which they would
market as "Paris Originals" but sell cheaply Stateside.
Tomorrow the Museum at FIT will open an entire exhibition — "Faking It:
Originals, Copies and Counterfeits" — devoted to the history of counterfeiting
fashion. "It’s such a hot topic now, and I think it’s really fascinating for
people to realize that both illicit and licit copying was such a big part of
fashion for so long," museum director Valerie Steele told the Cut.
http://www.graziaprom.co.uk/prom-dresses
The exhibit — the work of assistant curator of costume and textiles Ariele
Elia — features a piece that Steele laughingly calls "an atrociously fake
Vionnet." (Designer Madeleine Vionnet was so terrified of counterfeits that she
emblazoned the labels of her designs with her own fingerprint.) Coco Chanel was
the polar opposite of Vionnet — she saw the copies as good publicity. "She
wasn’t losing clients," Steele points out. "Those [customers] wouldn’t have been
her clients." Christian Dior was more in the "lockdown" camp, marking his
authentic designs with invisible ink that could only be revealed by a black
light. Images that were disseminated to publications like Paris Match sometimes
blacked out the actual designs. And in 1956, Balenciaga and Givenchy banned the
press from seeing their collections for a month in order to deter
counterfeiting.
It's easy to see why the specter of copying was so terrifying to mid-century
designers — the copyists' methods were incredibly crafty. Steele says that noted
'30s designer Elizabeth Hawkes's first job in Paris was as a covert sketcher.
"They would have people around monitoring to try to make sure they weren’t
sketching, and people would bribe workers at the couture houses to smuggle stuff
out to them. There was a lot of secrecy about moving clothes between the atelier
and [the show venue], with models wrapped in sheets so that you couldn’t see
them." Sometimes they got even sneakier, according to Elia: "They would send in
a supposed potential client who was being fitted and she would say, 'Oh, I would
really love to try this on in the comfort of my own home.' They trusted the
client. And she would actually take it to a copy house. They would take apart
the dress and copy all the patterns. Or create patterns from it, put it back
together, and then the next morning, she would go back to the couture house and
say, 'Actually, I’m not really interested in it anymore.'"
Some houses wised up and authorized licensed copies from the designers
themselves — Paul Poiret and the House of Worth were among those who pioneered
the practice at the turn of the century. "The poster for the show has a Chanel
couture suit from 1966 and a licensed copy, which was probably done for
Ohrbach’s," say Steele. "They are virtually identical, although if you actually
touch and handle them you’ll see that they skimped on some things." She noted
that stores "would show the original Chanel with the price tag [reading] $350,
and then the Ohrbach’s 'Chanel,' $37, side by side in the window." Sewing
patterns were another form of licit copying: "Even someone as complicated as
Charles James sold patterns to different companies," says Steele. (Just imagine
trying to DIY your own Charles James original!)
More recent entrants in the exhibit include pieces from Jeremy Scott's
Moschino debut, where he famously referenced fast food, and designer-parody
pieces from Brian Lichtenberg (of the Homiès Paris logo) and What About Yves
(whose Ghostbusters-themed T-shirt, the subject of a trademark-infringement
lawsuit by Chanel, will be on display).
And while copying is not a recent phenomenon, both curators are quick to
point out that the line between real and counterfeit is getting thinner and
thinner with the proliferation of what are known as "super fakes" — copies so
slavishly detailed that it takes an expert to gauge their authenticity. Steele
noted that those fakes sometimes even share a provenance with the Real McCoys:
"I gather that very often even the same factories will be doing it."
