With tens of thousands of style moguls in the world’s fashion capital this month checking out and stocking up on the latest trends, counterfeiters and crime-busters are having a field day.
From jewelry to apparel to home accessories and goods, the city’s twice-yearly trend and trade shows held on the eve of Paris Fashion Week attract more than 100,000 buyers and designers, both domestic and foreign.
Photographs are banned and access severely restricted to stands at the half dozen events taking place in town, yet at this week’s lingerie show a top lace-maker from Austria was furious.
On visiting the Mode City trends center, a focal point for makers of underwear and swimwear looking for next season’s colors, fabrics and cuts, Markus Hammerle stumbled onto one of his own exclusive laces — but it was a forgery being exhibited by an Italian firm as its own design.
“All our designs are offered on an exclusive basis to our clients,” he said. “If they see a copy elsewhere they might conclude we were selling them counterfeits, that we were cheats. This could damage our reputation.”
Long blamed on Asia and believed to be restricted to luxury brands, counterfeiting clothes is widespread across Europe and as often as not practiced by reputable high street brands, said specialist lawyer Corinne Champagner Katz.
As head of a prestigious one-hundred-year-old embroidery firm on Lake Constance that sells to established lingerie brands such as Triumph or Wacoal, Hammerle took his case to her and within 24 hours had secured a signed pledge from the Italian counterfeiter to withdraw the lace from sale.
“We invest a lot of money in design and research,” Hammerle said in an interview.
“This is a huge problem. When designers are faced by counterfeiters they must take action as we did. You musn’t let forgers feel they can get away with it,” he said.
Though they may seem insignificant, the swatches of lace trimming on underwear, not to mention wedding gowns, are key to sales.
“It’s that piece of lace that will sell a bra,” said Champagner Katz, who for several years has been helping lingerie makers protect their rights during the Paris shows.
“Lace is a prime victim of forgery,” she added.
Industrial espionage and forgery were age-old problems, she said, “but there are more and more copies being made in every sector of the fashion field. And with the modernization of communication the copies are quick.”
At the exclusive fabrics fair, Premiere Vision, where stands have high enough walls to conceal the samples, one resourceful counterfeiter used a watch-camera that transmitted snapshots directly via the Internet.
“Whenever you come up with a really exceptional design you can be sure someone else will copy it,” said Christian Keusseyan, joint director of French swimsuit and lingerie firm Pain de Sucre.
“If it’s a tiny boutique or a small company we don’t react because fashion after all is always inspired by someone else’s design. But when it’s a well-known brand with a turnover 10 times as big as ours that exports across the world, it’s unacceptable. It’s like being robbed,” Keusseyan said from inside his stand, where staff admit visitors only after checking their credentials.
Keusseyan’s company produces 200,000 swimsuits a year and has already won lawsuits for copyright breach against Spain’s Manuel Canovas, Italy’s Argento Vivo and known brands from France, Germany and Australia.
A complaint has also been filed against one of the top US labels, which cannot be named with the case still pending.
“It can take us three to four years to get a design just right and then that model will sell through several seasons in different fabrics,” Keusseyan said.
“No one would copy the Coca-Cola or Evian bottle, would they?” he said.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS