Fashion: Art or Craft?

[mcroft]

According to ParticleMan (a nice guy I haven't ever met), there's a move afoot to change the status of "Fashion" from a craft to an art, which really means there's an attempt by the fashion industry to secure for themselves the benefits of copyright protection for the design of clothing.

It's an interesting argument, and there is certainly deceptive trade going on in copies of clothing and there's also clearly a lot of borrowing between designers. But copyright? I'm not convinced. ParticleMan is a law student who wants to go into copyright law, and he is.

P-Man says "The creator is entitled to protection of the unique expression of an idea (though not the idea itself)."

Anyone here have any thoughts (on this. Opinions on the Battle of Balaclava are not relevant...)?

Comments

[kodi]

It sounds like ParticleMan is saying, "If we allow fashion designs to be copyrighted, then those copyrights are being violated, therefore we must allow them to be copyrighted."

I don't think it's a good idea, but I'm having a hard time figuring out why. Assuming that full copyright protection is afforded to all fashion designs, though, wouldn't photographs of people wearing designs created in the past century be derivative works?