Despite the fact that fashion law is a legal discipline, which found its practical grounds and that was well-established in the countries where traditional fashion markets emerged such as United States of America, Japan, France and England, it is gradually developing in Turkey just as many fashion disciplines and tries to fulfill the legal requirements of the sector.
Fashion law incorporates many legal disciplines such as Law of Contracts, International Commercial Law, Advertisement Law, Competition Law, Business Law and Industrial Property Law in particular. Fashion Law appears as a new branch of law that finds its practical ground in all stages of value chain in relation to formation of legal ground of the strategies, specified in the procedures from the protection of the intellectual and industrial rights on a product in conceptual design stage of any product to the production, marketing-sales, consumption and following stages in industrial fashion market.
It is essential that the value chain, involving any and all activities, which are required from conceptual design of any product and service to the delivery of the same to the customers in fashion sector, should be well-built and managed. In the globalizing fashion industry, fashion law is of capital importance in fictionalization and management of branding, designing, manufacturing, selling-marketing, delivery and logistic strategies so that competitive advantage could be gained.
Failure to determine and manage value chain’s so-called management strategies in a healthy way will result in failure to obtain intended competitive advantage. Fashion law has great importance in raising a creative awareness, focused on providing added-value and thus obtaining the competitive advantage in the global market once such strategies have been determined and managed in any stage of value chain in these processes.
The garment and textile sector, which has a global value of $ 3 trillion, is growing. As the market in question grows, the imitation market in this field grows at the same rate. Not only textile products, but also cosmetics such as perfumes, make-up products are often exposed to imitation. Today, with the publication of online shopping, counterfeit sales through websites and social media have become one of the biggest problems of the sector. According to the Global Brand Counterfeiting Report published in 2018, global counterfeit sales through e-commerce in 2017 were around $ 323 billion. This figure caused $ 30.3 billion loss for luxury brands.
With such large numbers being pronounced, fashion brands have faced the risk of losing brand values and profitability rates, while fashion law has become a rising value at this point. Fashion lawsuits filed by brands have increased significantly in the last 20 years.
According to the report of the infringement lawsuits of Lex Machina, a research company conducting legal analyzes, the Coach brand has reached the top with 730 cases in terms of the number of lawsuits filed in the American courts between January 2009 and March 2016. Chanel, who came in second in the rankings, followed the Coach with 330 cases.
In addition, Deckers-Ugg Boots company was found to be the subject of 164 cases; Louis Vuitton was found to have 81 cases. Chanel received the highest compensation at $ 1 billion, while Burberry Ltd. was listed. Second, Burberry Ltd. with $ 523.1 million. U.K came in third with $ 416.6 million. List of Gucci America Inc. ($ 207.7 million) from Coach Inc. ($ 180.3 million), Nike Inc. ($ 170.6 million) from Converse Inc. ($ 166.2 million). According to the report, Chanel, Deckers, Tiffany, Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Coach have filed the most lawsuits against companies selling under the counterfeit domain names on the Internet.
When we think that this data only shows the situation in the US courts, when we add up the numbers in 18 countries where fashion law is active, it will not be difficult to predict how this branch of law will be strengthened in the coming years.
