The Knockoff Economy Read Online Free PDF Page A

The industry should be in a freefall economically (something like what we see in the mainstream music industry today, perhaps). Yet quite the opposite has happened. The American apparel industry has boomed over the past 50 years in the face of uncontrolled copying, and it has been vibrantly creative.
    What is perhaps most striking is that despite the ubiquity of copying, there is a greater diversity of designs available to consumers today than ever before. To be sure, some fashion insiders bemoan today’s world of high-end fashion, in which designers are under relentless pressure to come up with something new. 4 But it is hard to contend that the contemporary world suffers from too few designs or too little creativity. New labels abound, clothing is cheaper than ever, and designs come pouring out of small niche firms and major international design houses alike.
    Copying, in short, is commonplace in the fashion world, yet it has not destroyed the incentive to innovate. This is not to say that designers are not sometimes harmed by copying—perhaps Dana Foley and Anna Corinna might have sold more of their original design in a world without Forever 21’s knockoff. But the industry as a whole has thrived.
    Why do fashion designers continue to create in the face of such widespread copying? And what does this tell us about the nature of innovation?
A V ERY S HORT H ISTORY OF THE F ASHION I NDUSTRY
    The world of fashion—with its flamboyant personalities, ruinously expensive runway shows, and sometimes outrageous and borderline unwearable designs—strikes some as fundamentally silly. (Just watch
Zoolander
.) It is anything but. Conservative estimates suggest that worldwide the apparel industry sells more than $1.3 trillion of goods annually 5 —a number larger than the combined revenues of the motion picture, software, books, and recorded music industries. While not all of this fits most people’s definition of “fashion,” the world of apparel is large, rich, diverse, and truly global—with iconic brands, enormous advertising budgets, integrated international supply chains, and, increasingly, retail footholds in every corner of the world.
    Fashion was not always a global industry. For a long time it was, in its higher forms at least, synonymous with Paris. The great couture houses operated there, and elites throughout the world looked to Parisian designers for guidance on how to dress. 6 Today, Paris is a major node in the contemporary fashion network, and remains the center of the relatively tiny market in elaborate, handmade dressmaking.
    Traditionally, of course, all clothing was handmade and the market for “ready-to-wear” apparel—which today is essentially all clothes bought in the United States—was very small. The industrialization of apparel-making, which would ultimately transform the industry, began with the invention of the sewing machine in the mid-19th century. The United States was in fore-front of the move away from traditional custom-tailored clothing to premade garments purchased off a rack. Indeed, by the early 20th century, America was the acknowledged world leader in ready-to-wear. 7 In 1902 a British apparel trade magazine presciently bemoaned the dangers of an American-led “ready-made invasion,” noting that “a visit to America cannot fail to impress the stranger with the relative importance of the ready-made clothing industry there…. It seems ludicrous to say so, but there is a considerable and respected trade in ready-made suits.” 8
    Over the course of the 20th century, handmade clothing essentially died out in the West, save for the ever-shrinking couture industry and a tiny slice of high-end custom menswear. The rise of ready-to-wear not only meantcheaper clothing, made using some of the same mass production techniques pioneered by Henry Ford; it also meant that average consumers were now presented with a wide range of predetermined choices aimed to entice them to buy. In this way,