Fashion’s Latest Accessory: The Law

With intellectual property issues (like who owns the rights to red soles on shoes?), 3-D printing and its implications for counterfeiting, domain-name squatting, and violations of corporate social responsibility in the supply chain (the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh), it seems that one fashion brand or another is always in court lately, or trying to settle out of court.

Just last week, a Mexican tribe accused Isabel Marant of copying one of its traditional designs. (Among other recent disputes, Ms. Marant has also been accused of copyright infringement by Adidas, as has Marc Jacobs.) Also last week, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton won a long-running legal battle to finish renovating the Parisian department store La Samaritaine.

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But one industry’s growing pains are another’s opportunity, and on Monday, Fordham University School of Law announced what it calls the first degrees in fashion law: a Master of Law in Fashion (L.L.M.) for lawyers who want to focus on the style world, and a Master of Studies in Law (M.S.L.) for nonlawyers who work in fashion and want some grounding in the legal field.

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According to Prof. Susan Scafidi, who founded the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham: “Legal savvy, like business expertise, has always been an important component in building a successful fashion house or design career — it just hasn’t yet been recognized to the same degree. The current wisdom in the fashion industry is that every Yves Saint Laurent needs a Pierre Bergé, and every Marc Jacobs a Robert Duffy, and emerging designers are encouraged to develop both creative and business skills. But would we have Tom Ford without Domenico De Sole, or at least a significant degree of legal knowledge?”

Mr. De Sole was a lawyer, by the way.

Though fashion law has been a growing niche in a small part of the legal profession, and while Fordham established the Fashion Law Institute in 2010 (along with its Fashion Law Bootcamp summer program), in part because of lobbying from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which was a co-founder, the new offerings are a formal acknowledgment of the specialty.

The degree programs, which are offered on a full- or part-time basis, and last two semesters, will also explore employment issues as they apply to models, data privacy concerns linked to e-commerce and social media, and regulating claims “related to sustainability.”

Interesting, those last few.

As to why someone who is not a lawyer might want to devote time to the subject, Professor Scafidi has a somewhat pointed answer.

“Every designer should have a minimum degree of legal literacy,” she said, “if only to know when to seek a legal opinion — and to avoid being sent to sit at the kids’ table while the grown-ups make the legal decisions that will determine the future of their lives and labels.”

In other words: You know all those designers who lost the rights to their names (John Galliano, Hervé Léger and so on)? At the very least, training could help prevent such results.

Whether it will also help prevent more lawsuits, or will create them, is another question.