The Fashion Industry Law Blog
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The Fashion Industry Law Blog provides highlights on legal issues, business news and colorful anecdotes related to the fashion and apparel, jewelry, accessories, textiles and related industries.
The Fashion Industry Law Blog
2y ago
By Alan Behr
Alan Behr published a New York Law Journal article on the proposed New York State Legislature’s Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act, a bill that stands to have a major impact on fashion companies operating in New York state as well as show hints of what may arise elsewhere.
The bill, if signed into law in its current form, would add a new §399-mm to the State’s General Business Law to require that any fashion company with more than $100 million in “annual worldwide gross receipts” disclose on its website “its environmental and social due diligence polic ..read more
The Fashion Industry Law Blog
2y ago
By Alan Behr, Phillips Nizer Partner
In their short history of being the greatest advance in art since cave painting, NFTs have raised new questions of esthetics (which sometimes interest lawyers), new questions about the art market (which interests them now and then) as well as new questions of law (which interest them compulsively). As a member of the Copyright Society, the International Trademarks Association and the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art, I periodically wade across all those streams. I will not, in my capacity as an art critic, go into my analysis of the artistic ..read more
The Fashion Industry Law Blog
2y ago
Shopper watches window of Ermenegildo Zegna store in Vienna
By: Brian Brodrick, Phillips Nizer Partner
Ermenegildo Zegna N.V., a world-renowned Italian luxury fashion group, has completed its previously announced “going public” business combination with Investindustrial Acquisition Corp. (NYSE:IIAC) (“IIAC”), a special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC) sponsored by investment subsidiaries of Investindustrial VII L.P. The shares of the newly combined company started trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, December 20, 2021 under the ticker symbol “ZGN.”
Zegna was founded in ..read more
The Fashion Industry Law Blog
2y ago
By: Phillips Nizer Partners: Alan Behr, Charles LaPolla, Andrew Tunick and Intern: Yann Rimm
Those of you who remember New York City from the late 1970s do not need anyone to tell you that the City has changed drastically since then. Back when New York City experienced its all-time high crime rate that helped frighten away tourism (and residents), the City desperately needed help. Overheated municipal spending in prior years and other factors led to serious financial problems. In 1975, President Gerald Ford denied the federal assistance requested in order to stave off a pote ..read more
The Fashion Industry Law Blog
2y ago
By: Yann Rim, Phillips Nizer Intellectual Property Intern
Being home to Paris and Milan, the European Union (“EU”) has every reason to draft its laws to protect fashion designers and their works with particular care. An efficient way of protecting fashion designs is through the Unregistered Community[1] design, which protects design works without requiring any registration process for a limited period of three years (instead of the five years of protection, with renewals, given to registered designs[2]). As the fashion industry often depends on short-lived, seasonal designs, many ..read more
The Fashion Industry Law Blog
2y ago
By: Alan Behr, Phillips Nizer Partner and Fashion Law Chair
The best words in any language were long ago vaccinated against easy translation. I am German and I still struggle to explain Gemütlich in simple terms. In my lumbering study of Italian (my pandemic at-home challenge), I came across sprezzatura, which can be roughly translated as a refined and carefully executed appearance of effortlessness. If you see a man wearing perfectly coordinated clothes with every appearance of somehow having just thrown them on before leaving home—that’s sprezzatura. (Rest assured: h ..read more
The Fashion Industry Law Blog
3y ago
By Candace R. Arrington, Phillips Nizer Associate
The 2021 G7 Summit, hosted in Cornwall, England earlier this month, generated eye-catching headlines about COVID-19, Brexit, and even Kate Middleton’s bejeweled bracelet originally worn by Princess Diana. Annually, heads of state from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States meet to strategize around global issues. This year, one of the issues addressed by the G7 was the hot topic of sustainability in fashion.
Sustainable fashion is an initiative to reduce the fashion industry’s impact ..read more
The Fashion Industry Law Blog
3y ago
By Alan Behr, Phillips Nizer Partner and Fashion Law Chair
Photograph Copyright © 2021 by Alan Behr
We noted in a recent report in The New York Times of a husband and wife, both in their sixties, whose company owned a Massachusetts warehouse in which Brooks Brothers had stored fixtures, displays and props. As a byproduct of the bankruptcy of that signature purveyor of American style, the entire lot was abandoned in their care, leaving the couple with a warehouse full of trunks, mannequins, racks, Christmas trees and more—instead of rent that had been the primary source of their personal ..read more
The Fashion Industry Law Blog
3y ago
By: Alan Behr, Phillps Nizer Partner and Fashion Law Practice Chair
About 2020 we can only say what the videogame hero Duke Nukem would sometimes offer when things turned out badly for him: “This sucks.” If you work for a company that rents evening attire, you have probably felt that more often than most by now; but if you work for a company that supplies Amazon with cardboard boxes, you may to be feeling just fine, thank you.
For 2021, many of us, whatever our employment, have resolved to make it a better one simply by going somewhere (just about anywhere) and, once there, doing someth ..read more
The Fashion Industry Law Blog
3y ago
By: Alan Behr, Phillps Nizer Partner and Fashion Law Practice Chair
Alan Behr at home, working remotely
The inexplicable year 2020 was marked by technology connections that curiously spun into the fashion business worldwide. It is easy to point to the new Zoom wardrobes people have been buying online as a good example, but consider for a minute some far more circuitous connections:
On New Year’s Eve, a friend sent me a Facebook page showing the Staatsoper of Vienna, one of the world’s preeminent opera houses, displaying across its Neo-Renaissance façade an enormous lighted sign that sequ ..read more