Following the recent furore online about Claire's Accessories' alleged rip-off of a jewellery design by Tatty Divine, the latest scandal, which has broken in the last couple of days, concerns a jumper designed by knitwear designer Kate Davies. Uncannily similar jumpers have recently been spotted at Debenham's, and Kate is clear that she has not been approached by the company for permission to use her design.
For Kate's account of the design of the famous o w l s jumper, see http://katedaviesdesigns.com/2012/07/08/the-o-w-l-sweater-a-design-story/
Whatever the outcome of the legal process which will no doubt result from this, the issue of the rip-off is one which should exercise every designer, maker and artist. The legal protection under 'design rights' is sufficiently nebulous to most of us to be a serious cause for concern. How can we - generally small operators, often sole traders, with limited financial and legal resources at our disposal - protect ourselves and our work against national or multinational companies? How can we prove that it is our design, and also that there has been a process of transmission by which they could have seen our work? How can we insure against the devaluation of our own, artisan-made products, in the face of cheaper mass-produced versions?
It is hard enough to explain to customers why my felt corsages cost upwards of £15 when a felt corsage can be bought on the hight street for considerably less than a fiver. The British wool fibres used in my felt are hand dyed by people known to me in Yorkshire and Wales. I hand make the felt - one set of corsage petals at a time - with subtle nuances of colour and texture. I then stitch the corsage together myself, and incorporate a unique handmade bead created by an artisan glass bead maker based in South Wales - the colours of the glass and the wool are co-ordinated for each corsage. Personally, I think £15 is ludicrously cheap for such a unique item, and doesn't remotely reflect my time in making it and the cost of the materials, but it's all the market will stand. Meanwhile, the high street version has been cut out of machine produced felt, and assembled in a factory in China, almost certainly by workers whose pay and conditions would not be permitted in this country. It has then been shipped half way round the world, generating a carbon footprint which I find it hard to justify for what is, after all, only an accessory. But in this country, we still do not - with a few honourable exceptions - have a buying public who appreciate quality, uniqueness and artisan work, and are prepared to pay for it, and therefore those of us who design and make such products have an uphill struggle to persuade the public that it's worth investing in what we do. After all, a felt corsage is just a felt corsage, right?! If we now also have to defend our designs, and the integrity of the quality of our products, against mass-production apparently based on our ideas, then the designers and makers of whom so much is currently being asked to help tip this country back into growth and prosperity, are onto a hiding to nothing. We can't compete on mass production in foreign factories with cheap labour - we CAN compete on quality, integrity of design, provenance of materials, artisan skills and sustainability. But not if we keep finding cheap rip-offs on the high street, because the buying public is not generally sophisticated enough to know the difference, or care. And as for how we change that - if I knew the answer to that, I could afford to retire!
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