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Archives for the 'Design' Category

The Best Fireworks Display is Seen From a Plane Flying into LAX Sometime Between 9 - 10pm

Independence day is my favorite holiday. Partly because it’s not in the winter, so there’s no seasonal affective disorder. Another reason is you don’t need to celebrate it with your family. It is the first guaranteed easy day of summer. Plus it means my birthday is just a few weeks away.

Last year to the day tomorrow, I was flying into Los Angeles. The cheapest flight I could get was on the 4th in the evening. I thought I would be missing the parties, but what I got was so much more.

From my window I looked at the beautiful infinite motherboard of lights that is the city as seen from the air. And just above it, little ripples of hundreds more colored lights. The firework explosions were all so tiny, and yet I could see them go off above every city subdivision. And all of it was happening at once.

There was the Glendale fireworks and the Long Beach celebration over there. You could see another firework show above Malibu and Culver City, and Westwood, and everywhere else. A firework show for every neighborhood, and from my vantage point, I could see them all at once. It was one of the most beautiful and amazing things I’ve seen in my life; made even more special by that fact so few people will have the chance to experience it.

If this were a short story or a better crafted essay I might have played up my disappointement in missing all the Independence Day barbeques, or emphasize that the day has some sentimental significance to me besides what I’ve already written. But it is just a blog post so I’ll state the point here more directly, and even use a tired cliche to finish this post: the best things come when you least expect them.

Enjoy your holiday!

Images by Yoon Lee.

Posted by Joanne on Jul 3, 2008 | Link

A Trip to the Zoo

The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary. The same animal may well look at other species the same way. He does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look….

The relation may become clearer by comparing the look of an animal with the look of another man. Between two men the two abysses are, in principle, bridged by language. Even if the encounter is hostile and no words are used (even if the two speak different languages), the existence of language allows that at least one of them, if not mutually, is confirmed by the other. Language allows men to reckon with each other as with themselves. (In the confirmation made possible by language, human ignorance and fear may also be confirmed. Whereas in animals fear is a response to signal, in men it is endemic.) … No animal confirms man, either positively or negatively…

The first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relationship between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that relation what the two terms — man and animal — shared in common revealed what differentiated them. And vice versa.

-John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking.

So maybe dolphins didn’t really commit mass suicide, and maybe elephants can’t really paint self-portraits, and maybe a parrot never served as key witness in a murder trial, and maybe monkeys don’t have real conversations– animals are a lot smarter than you think. To the left is my dog’s favorite toy, to the right is a coffee cup that scares the bejeebus out of her (it’s also a picture of her doppleganger.) Another example of how uncanny valley creeps out animals too.

The other day, I was in a shopping mall and for whatever reason stopped by the pet store. It was a typical mall pet store, the size of a closet, at the far corner where all the cheap and badly maintained stores are located. Seeing a dozen or so puppies in their cages gave me a terrible sense of guilt. Like I should take them all — pay for them — and save them from further torture. But that would only encourage the store to breed more puppies in even worse conditions.

The Sundance Channel’s Big Ideas for a Small Planet “animals” special is the best episode in an already great series. They highlighted an animal shelter in Dallas doing its best to provide safe, friendly, spacious (green) conditions for its inhabitants. The structural changes indirectly raised a practical question: who is going to go to the pound if you are only going to experience that guilty feeling that you need to save them all?

Another segment was on the maintenance of the Bronx zoo, where they emphasize that conservation is their major goal. It got me thinking about how much has changed since John Berger wrote “Why Look at Animals?” in 1977. Berger’s essay talks about the way zoos at once seek the distinction given to museums, although they are taking subjects out of the natural environment in order to display. So what you have is an animal with a “frame around it.”

Visitors visit the zoo to look at animals. They proceed from cage to cage, not unlike the visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then more on to the next or the one after next… When you look at these animals, even if the animal is up against the bars, less than a foot from you, looking outwards in the public direction, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal; and the concentration you can muster will never be enough to render it…

The space in which they inhabit is artificial. Hence their tendency to bundle towards the edge of it. (Beyond the edges there may be real space.) In some cages the light is equally artificial. In all cases the environment is illusory.

Now zoo architects are working toward building less artificial environments(and cages are no longer acceptable in metropolitan zoos.) Still, the just open Norman Foster elephant house for the Copenhagen Zoo, and news surrounding it, shows the debate whether a zoo should exist at all never went away.

A design critic at The Guardian says, in an otherwise an enthusiastic post about the zoo addition, “How can any architect even begin to match the subtlety of a spider’s web or recreate the landscapes and forests elephants call home? Zoo architecture is, at best, an art, or beast, of uneasy and uncertain compromise.”

Images by Sarah Moon. Brightcove video and more about the artist.

Posted by Joanne on Jul 3, 2008 | Link

The World’s Strangest Housing Communities

“People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriends, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbor’s wives, no time ever for friends,” Wilder Penrose says in J. G. Ballard’s Super Cannes. The “great defect is that there is no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.”

Many of Ballard’s later novels investigate the coven-like nature of suburbia — gated communities, high rises. The architecture and technologies designed to save us time and make our lives easier, only dull our senses. Or, as Gang of Four put it, “The problem with leisure, is what to do for pleasure.”

Penrose, the psychiatrist in Ballard’s fictional French business park, believes there’s a science to it: “Part of the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You’ve entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear.”

Ballard isn’t the only writer to explore these themes. Jingoism at the backyard level is the target in TC Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain. Neal Stephanson wrote about “burbclaves,” lots of franchised nations in suburbia. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower takes place in a walled Los Angeles suburb. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino sees housing communities optimistically as chocolate boxes. Then again, every example comes from the main character’s imagination. Here are several examples stranger than fiction:

The Dystopia: Alphaville, Sao Paulo, Brazil

A housing community has to be equal parts elitist and oblivious to take its name from a dystopic film. I first read about this on Ballardian, appropriately as Ballard has long championed Godard’s film. This Alphaville is a walled city in the world’s fourth-largest metropolis. Hundreds of residents helicopter in and out over electric fences. Over a thousand security guards are employed. Residents watch “TV Alphaville,” a twenty -four hour monitor of people entering and exiting the premises. The reason for Alphaville’s militarized facility is clear: income disparity. From a 2002 Washington Post article: “the richest 10 percent of the population controlling more than 50 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 10 percent control less than 1 percent.” The article also explains Brazil’s $2 billion-a-year security industry. “Brazilians are armoring and bulletproofing an estimated 4,000 cars a year, twice as many as in Colombia, which is in the midst of a 38-year-old civil war.”

The Rumor: Wedderburn, “Midgetville,” Vienna, Virginia

Spend time in Northern Virginia and you’ll eventually hear of a community of little people in little houses…but no one ever knows how to get there. Given Fairfax County is a clown car of suburban landscaping — between two main drags three blocks apart, the tract housing seems to go on for miles — it’s entirely believable.

Wedderburn was built in the 1930s, in a wood along the W&OD Railroad. These cottages –some the size of small sheds — could be seen from the train, leading many to wonder if they were home to retired circus performers. That neighboring town Bailey’s Crossroads is connected to the Ringling Brothers collaborator made it believable.

Over the years, the rumors tended toward the sensationalistic. People said the “midgets” would attack your car if you drove near it. In 2004, after deciding to sell to a land developer, Wedderburn’s true identity was revealed. George Wedderburn’s relatives, who lived in some of the cottages and rented the others, said they were sick of teenage “midget hunters” vandalizing their property. See Nathan Rustlethwaite’s Flickr set for more. Sadly, it was torn down in March of 2008.

Update: From the comments on Hit and Run, I learned there’s a similar rumor about a neighborhood in New Jersey. Wikipedia says those small houses have no occupants, but does not give any history of its construction. There’s another community of “midget houses”in Oakdale, Long Island, New York. And this website claims there are a number of real gated midget communities in Kentucky, California, Ohio, and elsewhere. Maybe.

The Utopia: Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India

“Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole,” Mirra Alfassa, “The Mother” said, announcing the city’s incorporation in 1968. Most forms of private property are forbidden. Residents use electronic cards, rather than paper or coin currency, although visitors can pay in cash. The enormous golden golf ball is Matrimandir (”Temple of the Mother,”) the “soul of the city.” It is located in a large open area called “Peace.” If this is sounding like Jonestown or the Heaven’s Gate community, it might surprise you to learn religion too is banned. “The Mother” said, “The failure of religions is… because they were divided. They wanted people to be religious to the exclusion of other religions, and every branch of knowledge has been a failure because it has been exclusive. What the new consciousness wants (it is on this that it insists) is: no more divisions. To be able to understand the spiritual extreme, the material extreme, and to find the meeting point, the point where that becomes a real force.” Among the community’s other quirk’s — public drinking fountains have “dynamised” water, water that has “listened” to Bach and Mozart.

BBC recently investigated claims that some Aurovillians sexually abuse the children who live in poverty outside the city. The reporter called it a “brazen” practice, made worse by Auroville’s absent rule of law.

The Ruins: San Zhi, “Desolation Row,” Taipai, Taiwan

This pod city might have been a holiday destination for those who dream of living in a futuristic fairytale. But from what little is written about San Zhi in English, it appears construction was abandoned as the project was just weeks from completion.

There seems to be nothing wrong with the structure architecturally. Apart from the fabulous design, it seems a functional concept. Some speculate it was designed to build more pods vertically, if demand increased. Apparently, construction was halted as a number of fatal accidents plagued construction. Ghost stories abound, (but then again, there are bloggers who still believe in Midgetville.) The buildings have since been left to rot.

The web has its fill of ghost towns and urban ruins photography, but the obvious science fiction influence and its perplexing lack of use (I’ve heard more than several people say they’d love to spend the night there) make this the strangest example of an abandoned space yet. Google Sightseeing has a feature, and Craig Ferguson’s photographs are extraordinary. (More photos here.)

The Counterfeit: Orange County, China

China doesn’t just manufacture fake Louis Vuitton bags. They also copy United States gated communities. This Orange County is miles from the Beijing airport, and 45 minutes from the Forbidden City.

California McMansions developers were flown in to develop a replica of The OC, even taking its name. Ten miles from the Beijing Olympics facilities, when the New York Times reported on it in 2003, the six-lane highways were brand new and most of the land surround the OC had yet to be developed. It seems likely that space is under construction right now.

It would be unfair to criticize them just for ignoring their own culture. After all American architecture is just a pastiche of other traditions, and plenty of replicas like the windmills in Japan, are charming enough. Good magazine notes an “entire cottage industry has sprung up in academia to tar the development with the latest post-modern jargon…Other critics, with far bigger megaphones, see the development as emblematic of China’s burgeoning car culture and its wholehearted embrace of environmentally destructive growth.”

Rather Orange County, China is a mistake largely because it was built after suburbia’s failure was widely understood. Rather than embracing Jan Gehl and Jane Jacobs’ principles of urban planning, they implemented poor land use. If there’s anywhere China should be replicating, it’s Melbourne.

China, by the way, is home to another community living in the past: Nanjie Village, a re-collectivized land, nostalgic for the days of Mao Zedong.

Elsewhere

I considered including the proposal for Paulville to this list. It is an upcoming gated community for Ron Paul supporters. But I really doubt it will come to fruition. Previously, there was the Free State project, and New Hampshire still isn’t a major libertarian mecca. The same people who value individual choice, are unlikely to move specifically to join a community. It’s just not that high a priority to one’s personal interests

Other examples I thought of, like Celebration, Florida, Disney’s suburb, which opened its gate in 1997, are not so strange once one looks at the details. The people and the secrets may be unique, but the development itself differs not much from another planned community halfway across the globe.

Planned communities always hint at mob rule in its extremes — lynchings or what happened to Kitty Genovese. You may not agree with the Super Cannes character who believes that “places like Eden-Olympia are fertile grounds for an messiah with a grudge. The Adolph Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.” But it’s something to think about before signing up for a colony on Mars.

A Hundred Chances: White Lies Post-Facebook

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards, in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hamsphire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1814

Growing up I wanted to be a Hitchcock blonde. Not only because they were witty and beautiful and were dressed by Edith Head, but because they would happen upon a vault of cash, stuff it in a bag, drive off in a Cadillac convertible to
start an entirely new life — or try to.

I don’t advocate breaking the law, yet the possibility of reinventing one’s self seems a dying art. Human resources checks all your references and degree credentials. And the Internet means all your lies will be exposed provided someone cares enough to learn the truth about you. Only professionals — con men — can really get away with it.

Last month, NBC aired a Dateline episode on con artist 2.0, Gemase Simmons. The extent of his reality tv charade is almost unbelievable. Pretending to be a former model (his height and appearance alone contradict his claimed experience in the industry,) he recruited a dozen people to appear on the so-called television model search using Craigslist and Myspace. Services were provided free in exchange for advertising when the show was to air. A full crew was hired (they left after a few weeks, when they didn’t get paid,) so all of his bizarre antics are caught on tape. He had them stay at a campground, and made them go through the kinds of optical course challenges reality tv is known for. People grew suspicious even before he made sexual advances on the participants — male and female — when the cameras weren’t rolling.

Magician Silhouette Right.jpg Simmons has spent his life reinventing himself. He wasn’t just a “model/actor” but a political consultant, a writer, an R+B producer –with ten outstanding arrest warrants, (a mugshot showed him with a Catholic priest’s collar.) This guy was born to lie, and dreamt big enough to get away with it (And he would have, if MSNBC hadn’t heard of him — the only reason they did is one of the cameramen he hired had a connection to the news program.) Simmons, by the way, denies every charge.

Compare that to story of Hope Ballantyne, recently profiled in Radiolab’s “Deception” episode. She’d move in a new place, write a bad check and move again. She conned dozens of Bay Area residents out of thousands of dollars. From a 2000 article in the San Francisco Examiner:

[A former roommate] led the search for Hope after finding spiral notebooks scrawled with names and phone numbers amid the woman’s left-behind bags of designer clothes and make-up.

When Nuccio began contacting the people listed, she learned that complaints about Hope stretched back at least three years to Los Angeles - giving a frightening context to her own rental rip-off…
“What’s frustrating about the whole thing is that she continues to screw people,” said Mara Soucie, 30, who works in production management at cable music channel VH1 in Los Angeles. “She seems so normal, a bright girl. Always could think on her feet.”

I don’t think Ballantyne could get away with those things in today’s San Francisco. A few blog and Facebook posts could prevent her from ever striking again. But that there’s no further news on Ballantyne, following an arrest in 2004, doesn’t mean she’s changed her ways so much as that she may be using another name.

For the rest of us, lying just doesn’t pay off. Even with the best intentions — say your boss is a sexist pig and fired you for some arbitrary reason — you can’t explain it in a resume, and you can’t lie without the risk of getting caught (Your former boss, on the other hand, is entirely welcome to lie to a human resources manager about your work ethic and skill set.) It’s only going to get harder, as web presence becomes a necessity. The white lie is dead.

The hoax, of course, persists, but with many complications. “Myth-busting” is such a popular blog sport, that truths to the tales are thrown out with the falsities. Barack Obama isn’t a Muslim… but his father was. Similarly, Guillermo Vargas Habakkuk, who I even posted about earlier with some confusion, isn’t entirely a hoax. The trouble with that meme starts with his name: it’s written both Guillermo Vargas Habakkuk or Guillermo “Habacuc” Vargas, or some variation of either, so googling with quotation marks only gives you a sample of the results. There’s a petition to ban him from Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008, which doesn’t appear to exist. Or is it the Central American Biennale? Google suggests, “Central American Biennial.” Lesson one: don’t trust sources in translation.

There is a Central American Biennale and there is an artist named Guillermo ___ Vargas, but the dog didn’t die (the most likely sources say.) What’s missing in the cries of “hoax” is that he did starve a dog in an art show (or maybe he did?) He did it, apparently, to drum up exactly the kind of protest he’s receiving now: to show that people will care about an animal dying in a gallery, but not the billions dying in the streets. World Society for the Protection of Animals has some updates on it.

And I wonder how the Internet is impacting espionage. One of the best episodes in Errol Morris’ First Person — The Little Gray Man — is about Antonio Mendez, former spy. He talks about being an invisible man, the kind of guy you just never look at — if you’re used to the checkout lady noticing the person behind you in line before you, then you’d be a great spy. He’s written two books, and his life story is soon to be a movie. Twenty years from now, when even middle aged office employees are in social networks — will we still be able to create false identities for CIA operatives?

Rip Mix Stitch: Free Fashion Culture

What would happen if the Gossip Girl cast were to design an ARG? It might turn out like middlebrow-luxury handbag house Coach’s college outreach campaign. It starts with a fictional girl who lost her Coach bag, complete with a fake myspace page, fake facebook, and fake blog!

Visitors to the blog (encounterheidi.blogspot. com), which drew more than 15,000 hits after the posters went up, learned that the bag was a gift from an ex-boyfriend serving in Iraq.

One day, Cee blogged that another student had returned the bag. A day later, she wrote that on closer inspection, the bag was a fake and she had been scammed for the reward.

Outraged (”EFFING COUNTERFEIT!” she wrote), Cee blogged that she was researching the world of counterfeit goods. She discovered, she wrote, that they’re linked to criminal activity, child labor and terrorism. She even posted a video to YouTube about counterfeiting, “Break the Chain,” and organized an anti-counterfeiting event on campus that drew a crowd with free food and T-shirts.

But here’s the thing about Cee: She’s fake, too. A public relations class at Hunter invented her last spring. The course was funded by a $10,000 grant from Coach and was part of a college outreach campaign by the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC), a trade group that includes Coach and other brands like Apple, Levi Strauss & Co., Louis Vuitton and Rolex.

But it gets dirtier. This is the work of a teacher and class at Hunter College.

A well-known sculptor in the 90s painted fast food containers with the Louis Vuitton monogram. I can’t remember who it was but if I could, this right here would be an insightful paragraph comparing his art with Takashi Murakami’s Louis Vuitton store at the Brooklyn Museum, with some added remarks on how and why the times have changed.

Since then, Adbusters and street artists have expanded on the concept. Now Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles (via) has a solo show for Peter Gronquist with designer labels on everything from chainsaws to electric chairs:

A writer from Jezebel once sewed designer labels in lower-priced clothes and asked for offers from consignment shops.

The Final Tally:

H&M dress (original price, $39.99) masquerading as Isaac Mizrahi: 2 for 3, with highest offers of $130 and $190.

Club Monaco jacket (original price, $199) masquerading as Richard Tyler: 2 for 3, with offers of $90 and $110.
Club Monaco skirt ($129) masquerading as Donna Karan: 2 for 3, with offers of $78 and $135.
Club Monaco sweater ($99) masquerading as Calvin Klein: 1 for 3, with offer of $50.

Ours is the first generation that truly defines itself by brands, as Rob Walker’s new book “Buying In” explains. But reputation alone doesn’t explain it, nor does personal identification with the product marketing. When it comes to luxury goods, there has to be some added magic to the product. That’s why no matter how many counterfeits flood the market, Louis Vuitton can command a high price.

In “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” Dana Thomas reports 40 percent of all Japanese own a Louis Vuitton-monogramed item. Her book is nostalgic for the days when high-end good meant quality, patiently crafted items that might last a lifetime. As LVMH changed hands, their standards declined. Meanwhile, expensive seemed attainable to those without qualms carrying credit card debt. Veronica Horwell writes in a review, “significant percentages of the global population have caught, or been taught, the mad idea that they can acquire the signifier of modernity, immunity, celebrity, identity - Thomas can’t or won’t define what the fantasy they’re after is - for the price of a Prada bag, or failing that, a Gucci wallet.”

Notice no one really pokes fun at Hermès, as they do Gucci, Prada, and LV. Although they charge twice more than Gucci and Louis Vuitton combined ($38,000,) there is no branding and no advertising to the masses. Unless you are in a select tax-bracket, a Birkin bag is understood to be impossibly out of reach. Writes Globe and mail’s Leah McLaren:

Earlier this year, I had my first-ever celebrity-bag sighting. I was eating lunch alone at an overpriced hotel when a cosmetically altered matron of indeterminate years pulled up a stool beside me, ordered a $22 glass of champagne and placed her black crocodile Birkin bag on the bar for all to see.

I couldn’t help staring and she didn’t seem to mind. No one spends $40,000 on a purse to hide it, after all. Sure, I’d clamped eyes on a few Birkins before (in the window of Hermès, on the arms of fashion editors at the shows in Milan and Paris), but this was my first sighting in the wild.

She’s reviewing Michael Tonello’s new book about getting rich off of buying and returning Birkin bags. How is that possible? you might wonder. Well, you can get some pocket change, as I have in the past, buying broken designer bags, taking them to tailors, and selling them. Ebay facilities so many new ways of commerce.

One Ebay, you can even buy a fake “vintage” bag. A few years ago, I came across the sort of deal one can only find via internet auction. Stuffed in a trunk “lot” full of some now-deceased grandmother’s treasures, was a vintage Gucci handbag, unmarked in the title by the seller, worth about $200. So I placed a bid for far less than that, planning to resell it and make a tiny profit. When the bag arrived and looked like it couldn’t be older than the age of the sweatshop workers in whichever third-world country it came from. I donated it to salvation army.

The irony is my fake is in far better condition than a real vintage would be. It has no scratches or damages; but feels dead in my hands. Why do I like vintage in the first place but for the totemism; the feeling that I am participating in the history of an object. The other irony is that Gucci’s quality has declined over the years. The material they use is easy to replicate, they have long since abandoned the sturdy canvas that made their items lovely. Yet, the prices are still the same.

For sale at the Brooklyn Museum.

Right now monogram-bag makers fight counterfeits for trademark infringement or dilution. But the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (pending in the Senate) offers stricter standards. Designers may register their clothes with the U.S. Copyright Office for about $100 each. The law would protect the patterns for three years.

“Fashion will become very boring if this legislation passes,” Omid Moradi of sometimes knockoff-er Faviana, tells Fortune, “All this will do is create a backlog of lawsuits - the only ones who will win are the lawyers.”

“[Pattern marking is] a craft, not an art. There is only so much you can do with a silhouette, a collar, a drape.” Ilse Metchek, executive director of the California Fashion Association, told the LA Times. “This act is a double-edge sword, because designers think they’re going to be able to protect themselves from knock-off artists, but they are going to have to make absolutely sure there is pure, unadulterated originality in everything they do…Wouldn’t anyone run afoul of things eventually?” says Ivan Arnold, co-owner of LA-based Tokitoki.

It is a particularly dumb move by one industry that is still doing well in this economy. Tech Dirt explains fashion thrives because of lack of IP protection.:

Fashion is a trend industry. You need a trend to make something popular and the only real way to get a trend is when designers are copying each other. Without that ability trends don’t show up, and the demand for the latest “trend” dries up. On top of that, having copycat designs on the lower end actually act as a “signal” that a high-end designer is on to something. It helps prop up the price of those name-brand designs, while making similar copycat designs more affordable to a lower end of the market that would never buy the high end designers. It’s both a way of establishing a larger market and doing price discrimination.

For another example of this read Daniel Pink’s cover story in Wired a few months back about the fan market for Manga.

Currently designers have the option of filing for patents, but there are ways of outwitting copycats without getting lawyers involved:

Meanwhile, some labels are trying to outmaneuver the pirates. Copycat designs often show up in stores within weeks of a fashion show, while the authentic clothes don’t arrive for months. Halston, which is owned by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, is one of those pushing to make its catwalk fashions available right away, on the online retail site Net-a-Porter.com, in hopes that shoppers will choose immediate gratification over price savings.

Weitzman and others are making some of their couture designs a little more haute so pirates can’t rip them off at all. For his spring collection, Weitzman created unusually shaped heels for a $299 shoe called the Bowden-Wedge. He is also experimenting with materials such as titanium and steel, which he says are too expensive for the knockoff artists. If they try something cheaper, like painted wood, the heels will snap. “I used to make whimsical and outrageous shoes for display only,” Weitzman says. “For the first time, they’re becoming part of sellable footwear.”

But why stop at fashion? Might Marianne Faithful come along and request I grow my bangs out? Maybe Nicole Kidman could protect plastic surgeons from copying her most-requested nose. For all the talk of our celebrity (and spawn)-obsessed culture, I am delighted to see Baby Jolie isn’t even first page Google result for “shiloh”. Nevertheless, her babymama (unsuccessfully) sued a perfumer for using a name that happened to be the same as her child’s.

Previously: