Johanna Blakley
Media | Entertainment | FashionArchive for fashion
What can fashion teach the news industry?
Remember my TED.com talk, Lessons from Fashion’s Free Culture? Well, a Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Center, Tomer Ovadia, interviewed me recently about what lessons the news industry might learn from the fashion industry. We discussed the many surprising parallels between the two and where the future might lead. Listen to the podcast now and let me know what you think!
Fashioning the Future
When I saw a recent piece about success implanting a worm’s brain into a Lego robot, I immediately thought of William Gibson’s most recent novel, The Peripheral. Placed simultaneously in the near future and another one 70 years further away, characters traverse the time gap dropping into low-fi or high-fi versions of that Lego robot.
I’ve always enjoyed Gibson’s obvious interest in the ironies that emerge when physical bodies blend into virtual realities. Gibson’s brand of virtual reality is never disengaged from a suffering body. A common complaint among characters in The Peripheral, and his earlier novel Pattern Recognition, is jet lag. One of the many clever conceits in The Peripheral is that traveling back or forward in time, to another point on the space/time continuum, can only be done in real time, in different time zones, in a persistent world ticking its way to different versions of the future.
In Gibson’s cyberpunk extrapolations, technologies that seem miraculous in our present moment always reflect the inconvenient limits of human capacity. In the distant future of The Peripheral, the supercomputer that allows the wealthiest hobbyists to fiddle with people’s real lives in the past is of unknown provenance. No one seems to know how it works or who created it, though everyone presumes it’s Chinese.
Likewise no one knows how an extremely powerful predictive algorithm that aids police in preventing crimes works – apparently because it’s self-taught and no one kept track of its accumulation of datasets. When “the Aunties,” as the system is called, makes a prediction, it has the taint of mindless unscientific human gossip. It’s the gut instinct gone hyperdigital. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve Been Upworthied!
I just found out my TED.com talk on fashion and copyright was deemed Upworthy. As you probably know, Upworthy is a crafty outfit that goes to great lengths to increase viewership of video content that serves some kind of socially progressive purpose. Part of their process includes generating multiple potential headlines and photos, and testing the different combinations on different platforms to see which combos attract the most views.
Of course it’s fascinating to me to see what they decided worked best for my video:
I must say, it never occurred to me that my argument was something “hippies” would love, but there ya go!
I’ve been following Upworthy’s progress for the last two and half years, and I was especially excited to hear about how they are developing new metrics for assessing how people are engaging with the media they’re promoting. Uniques? Nah. Time on site? Nope! Their latest focus? Attention Minutes, which they define here:
Attention Minutes measures everything from video player signals about whether a video is currently playing to a user’s mouse movements to which browser tab is currently open — all to determine whether the user is still engaged. The result is a fine-grained and unforgiving metric that tells us whether people are really engaged with our content or have moved on to the next thing.
At the Norman Lear Center, where I’m managing director, we have been studying the “Attention Economy” for several years, and now with our Media Impact Project, we have the opportunity to develop tools that accurately measure human attention. Needless to say, there’s a great deal of debate about how this might be done and so we invited several experts in the field — including Daniel Mintz from Upworthy — to debate the topic on our new website, The Fray. Launched with a skeptical piece by Richard Tofel from ProPublica, we solicited responses from ChartBeat, LunaMetrics, the Financial Times, Parse.ly and Columbia University.
This is not a debate that’s going to be settled any time soon, but I sure hope I find out whether my little video turns out to be must-see-TV for hippies.
Inspecting Indian Vogue
As I was shedding my last bunch of rupees at Indira Gandhi Airport in New Delhi, I quickly snagged a copy of Vogue India to read on the plane. I was curious to see how different it felt from the American version, especially after spending two weeks crisscrossing Northern India.
One thing I’d been warned about before arriving is that women on the street do not – I mean DO NOT – wear the kind of revealing clothing that you see in Bollywood films. Head to toe covering is the standard; even short sleeves are pretty rare. Even when it’s hot. Scorching hot.
Billboards and TV ads in India reflect the bodacious Bollywood ideal, but I can’t recall seeing anybody dress like that in even the glitziest restaurants and hotels in Delhi.
Much of the recommended clothing in the editorial portions of the magazine also defied street conventions, including shorts, short skirts, form-fitting or whisper thin dresses (a big no no, I was told), and long skirts (OK) with equally long slits (absolutely not OK). There was also a gorgeous swim suit spread, but I had to wonder: where in India could they be worn? As far as I could tell, Western-style hotel swimming pools would be the only acceptable place.
Similar to American Vogue, the Indian version featured profiles of successful women, including a comedienne, a radical novelist, and a slough of Indian art collectors in Dubai. The issue had a very global feel – it was, for instance, the first place I glimpsed Adidas’ fresh new World Cup garment collection, which they concocted in collaboration with The Farm Brand, a Brazilian fashion label.
I wasn’t surprised by the insane number of jewelry ads; women in India are often not allowed to have bank accounts or real estate assets, but the jewelry is often all theirs (check out this NPR piece about Indian women’s obsession with gold). Read the rest of this entry »
Fashion & Originality on the TED Radio Hour
Guy Raz interviewed me about the culture of copying in the fashion industry in what he called “maybe our best show ever.” During the TED Radio Hour, we discussed the cult of originality and the fashion industry’s constant creative incursions into the archives of fashion. The show also includes Steven Johnson on where ideas come from; Mark Ronson on sampling in the music industry and Kirby Ferguson on the ubiquity of remixing. Check it out and let me know what you think!
Imagining the Future of 3D Printing at Fractal
Ever since I started doing research on fashion design and copyright, I’ve been tracking the progress of 3D printing technology. The disruptive possibilities of this technology are abundantly clear in the fashion sector, and so I was thrilled to receive an invitation to attend fractal, a very unique conference in Medellin Colombia, where a diverse group of experts was asked to facilitate conversations about 3D printing, synthetic biology and other bleeding edge topics.
Hoping to shake-up the typical conference format, the instigators behind fractal – the intrepid Viviana Trujillo and Hernan Ortiz – decided to invite the audience to use “design fiction” to spin stories of the future that would reveal the key social, cultural, political and ethical quandaries that accompany the adoption of new technologies. The facilitators were a fascinating group: Reshma Shetty , an MIT-trained synthetic biologist; acclaimed artist and director Keiichi Matsuda, whose augmented reality installations have been featured at MOMA and the V&A, and Paul Graham Raven, a speculative fiction practitioner who uses narrative to solve engineering problems in the UK.
In addition to telling stories about how homes might be made out of living things and how augmented reality applications will fundamentally change the contours of our self-presentation to the world, we tackled the topic of 3D printing. Read the rest of this entry »
Made in Rio
Picture:
Beach looks from Blue Man, an Ipanema-based label.
Made in Rio: what does this phrase conjure for you? Caipirinhas in a steamy club? Live samba music in a gritty city square? Barely-there bikinis? Or gangster violence in hillside favelas (with million dollar views)? There’s a reason VICE calls it the sexiest city in the world, and from my own visit to Rio, I can testify to the exciting and troubling contradictions that define this unique city, which continues to increase its global influence despite its struggles with chronic poverty, corruption and violence.
This is the second in a two-part interview with Ronaldo Lemos and Pedro Augusto, who issued a fascinating report on the growing Rio fashion industry. Territórios da Moda (Fashion Territories) is currently only available in Portuguese and so I asked Ronaldo and Pedro if they would care to do an interview in English. You can check out Part 1 of our interview here, where we explore the burgeoning fashion scene in Rio and the many contradictions that animate a city that has captured the global imagination.
Johanna: In Territórios da Moda (Fashion Territories), you explore some of the contradictory perceptions that people have about Rio: on the one hand it’s a lush, expensive place – a sensual playground for cosmopolitan travelers; on the other hand, it’s a city filled with abject poverty and lawlessness. Do you think that the “brand” Made in Rio will ultimately reflect both of these perceptions?
Ronaldo & Pedro: Absolutely. Rio is a city where contradictions occupy the same physical space. The posh neighborhoods and the favelas are all together. The poor and the rich inhabit the same regions in Rio, unlike other cities. And that is reflected in Rio de Janeiro fashion. The permanent tension between chic and casual is an example of that. And that is precisely what makes Rio a fascinating city. In the past few years, there have been many changes in public policy, attempts to bridge the divides between the city and the favelas. And that has been important too. There is a great deal of optimism, and the fashion in Rio emerges from the mix of rich and poor.
Johanna: Have any designers tried to make “dangerwear” — clothing that reflects a dangerous gangster lifestyle in Rio, like we’ve seen in Los Angeles and other urban areas in the United States?
When Traditions Become Trends
Yesterday, I joined “Project Runway” finalist Korto Momolu on an episode of “The Stream,” an innovative multimedia show on al Jazeera English. The topic? Cultural appropriation. Turns out that Momolu has gotten a lot of heat for incorporating African designs and textiles into her work . . . despite the fact that she’s from Liberia. I was part of the mix in order to clarify some of the ownership rules around cultural remix practices in fashion.
Cultural Appropriation in Fashion
When I talk about copyright and fashion outside of the United States, I often get questions about the dangers of cultural appropriation. Shouldn’t it be illegal for Western fashion designers to steal traditional designs from Native American tribes or to appropriate design features from traditional Ethiopian garb?
My research on fashion and intellectual property has focused on the benefits – both to consumers and to the fashion business – of the lack of ownership of designs. Fashion is actually one of several industries that treat their creative output as a commons – shared resources that can be freely reused, recreated and recombined.
This is often music to the ears of free culture activists, libertarians and lots of people in the digital media industries, who have seen first-hand how difficult (and often counter-productive) it is to enforce copyright protections on creative work that can be copied perfectly with one click.
But for people who are concerned about cultural imperialism, this “free culture” sounds like just another opportunity to take advantage of the little guy. Read the rest of this entry »
Louis Vuitton: Trademark Bully
I am delighted to have been invited to participate in a symposium about fashion and intellectual property law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School March 20. They’ve put together an excellent line-up, and I’m looking forward to discussing the many problems that I see with pending legislation that may grant copyright protection to fashion designs. (You can see some of my thoughts about this here, here, and here.)
If anyone affiliated with the symposium was wondering how the major fashion labels might enforce the new and unprecedented protections that the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act (ID3PA) would grant them, Louis Vuitton gave them their answer on Wednesday. In a condescending cease and desist letter, Michael Pantalony chastised Penn for misappropriating and modifying their trademarks in a promotional poster for the student-run event. Calling it an “egregious action” and a “serious willful infringement” that “knowingly dilutes the LV Trademarks,” Pantalony went on to say that the use would
mislead others into thinking that this type of unlawful activity is somehow ‘legal’ or constitutes ‘fair use’ because the Penn Intellectual property Group is sponsoring a seminar on fashion law and ‘must be experts.’
It doesn’t surprise me at all that an Associate Dean for Communications at the Law School quickly responded to the letter saying they would immediately stop using the posters and invitations: bullying cease and desist letters like this often work that way. When the General Counsel of the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Firestone, saw the letter, he had a very different response, citing several reasons why Pantalony’s claims were absurd.
Trademark protection is meant to protect consumers and companies like Louis Vuitton from imitators who hope to convince potential customers that their products were actually made by the famous brand. Quality control and brand reputation is crucial in the fashion industry and trademark protections are a perfectly logical way to protect customers from fraud and to give companies the tools they need to protect their valuable reputations. Firestone rightly argues that putting a parody of the Louis Vuitton logo on a poster for a student run event about issues surrounding intellectual property protection in the fashion industry would not constitute trademark infringement: obviously, the students are not selling a product of any kind that could be confused with a Louis Vuitton product. Harm done? None. And Pantalony’s additional claim, that people would be mislead into believing that Vuitton is a sponsor of the conference, was also dismissed by Firestone since all the conference sponsors logos are prominently listed on the poster (you can see the full poster here).
Thankfully, in this instance, the students had knowledgeable legal counsel to protect them. But, as you can imagine, that is not always the case. Just imagine the type of bullying that can take place if ID3PA passes: companies with deep pockets will have the ability to scare off lesser-known designers from creating any designs that seem substantially similar to theirs. Introducing design monopolies into the fashion business is a huge mistake that I hope our federal House Representatives will be canny enough to avoid.
Johanna Blakley 