Copy or copyright fashion? Swedish design protection law in historical and comparative perspective

Marianne Dahl�n

Business History, 2012, vol. 54, issue 1, 88-107

Abstract: While fashion piracy has been practised on an industrial scale for at least a century, the levels of intellectual property protection for fashion design have been low in most nations. This article gives a summary of the context of the lack of design protection for the Swedish textile and fashion industries, broadly defined, in the twentieth century, with comparisons to contemporary debates on fashion and creativity and to the historical French and US context. France, the US and Sweden have followed different paths in their approaches to intellectual property protection for fashion design. A study of the Swedish legislative debates 1916--70 shows that the different legislative approaches are connected to the local contexts of production. It is proposed that one way of understanding the levels of protection for fashion design is in terms of the differences in logic between ‘fashion’ and ‘clothing’.

Date: 2012
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DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2011.617211

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