Certified Authentic?

Slow and Steady Wins the Race, After Balenciaga and After Gucci Bags, 2004

Don’ t miss the student symposium Certified Authentic? Counterfeits, Copies, and Constructions of Culture at the Bard Graduate Center (on 38 W. 86th St), which will be taking place this friday, April 25.

The keynote speaker, Susan Scafidi will be discussing fashion and counterfeiting. Scafidi is a Visiting Professor at Fordham Law School and member of the law and history faculties at Southern Methodist University, is author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law (2005), as well as a blog on law and fashion design, Counterfeit Chic

Also, on the topic of counterfeiting is Lynn Yaeger's article in this week’s Village Voice. The author’s visit to the Murakami exhibition at the Brooklyn museum and, particularly its accompanying Vuitton store, spurned her musings on Canal Street and fake Murakami purses.

Designing Sustainability as the New Cultural Paradigm

The Fashion Institute of Technology is making further leeways into exploring sustainable solutions to the fashion and design industries--at least at an educational level. A group of professors, students and alumni have started a sustainability group with the aim "to inculcate the concepts of sustainability into all aspects of what we do at FIT. Among other projects they have organized the conference "Designing Sustainability as the New Cultural Paradigm," to take place this Thursday the 17th from 8:00 AM-5:30 PM in The John Reeves Great Hall. For a list of speakers and other events organized concomitantly with the conference, you can visit the sustainability group at FIT site.

Upcoming Fashion Lectures

1920s New Yorker cover from "What a Dame! Tracking the Origins of the New York Woman in 1920s Media and 1930s Film" by Lisa Santandrea

April seems to be introducing a slew of fashion lectures. This Friday April 4, the NYU costume studies MA is hosting its yearly symposium, "The Seventh Richard Martin Visual Culture Symposium." The keynote speaker is Jan Glier Reeder, curator of the Brooklyn Museum Costume Documentation Project. Other lectures' topics include a talk on guerrilla stores (by Emily Marshall Orr) and a lecture by Lisa Santandrea, which tracks the origin of the New York Woman in 1920s Media and 1930s Film.

The symposium is taking place 6:00pm to 8:00pm in the Einstein Auditorium, 34 Stuyvesant Street, New York, tel. (212) 998-5700.

Coming up next week at the Fashion Institute of Technology is a talk by Christian Louboutin, which has been organized concomitantly with the Louboutin’s exhibition curated by the graduate students at FIT. (The talk is to take place on April 9 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm at FIT’s Katie Murphy Amphitheatre.)

The next day (from 6pm to 8pm) a panel titled “Women Rule Fashion”—moderated by FIT curators Molly Sorkin and Colleen Hill—will engage in a discussion on the way the fashion industry has historically and at times uncharacteristically allowed women to gain leadership positions. Joining in the discussion are designer Catherine Malandrino, Vogue editor Sally Singer, photographer Maria Chandoha Valentino and Susan Sokol, president of Vera Wang.

Panel on Fashion Blogging at the Met

Diane Pernet, Drawing by Siggi Oddsson

This Sunday, Harold Koda, chief curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, will host a panel on fashion and blogging, to which Cathy Horyn (the New York Times senior fashion critic) will participate together with Scott Schuman of the Sartorialist and Diane Pernet, editor of A Shaded View on Fashion.

It will be interesting to see whether they will address the different kinds of blogs: i.e. personal blogs (in the case of Diane Pernet) versus a blog hosted by an established editorial entity (as is the case of Horyn’s and to some extent the Sartorialist). And to what extent ethical questions (particularly when it comes to the Times) inform the various types of blogs and potentially clash with the conversational, un-fact-checked and, as a result, often un-journalistic nature of the media.

It is great that the Met is becoming interested in the phenomenon, however, I also hope that future blog panels will include younger fashion bloggers—i.e. Susie of Style Bubble and Almost Girl. The latter has in fact also started Coutorture—an umbrella fashion blog—which serves as a service to the fashion blog community.

The event is taking place Sunday March 30, 2008 at 3:00 p.m. in The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium and it's free with museum admission.

Francesca

Cloak and Dagger: Design Espionage

Printer's Sample Book, American, 1870, from the Multiple Choice Exhibition, currently on view

Tonight (Tuesday March 18) at Cooper-Hewitt:

Cloak and Dagger: Design Espionage

"In past centuries sample books served to record patterns and motifs used in decorative arts and were carefully guarded by manufacturers against espionage attempts from competitors. In this panel, held in conjunction with Multiple Choice: From Sample to Product. Cooper-Hewitt invites you to join intellectual property lawyer Harley Lewin, and Susan Posen, CEO of Zac Posen, in a conversation with Eric Wilson of The New York Times on how designers strive to protect their work in a knock-off culture."

The event takes place at 6: 30 Members and students with valid ID: $5; non-Members: $10.