Today’s entry was inspired by a link someone sent me to a blog entry that featured someone’s example of a knock off. The source is immaterial and remains unnamed but we can learn a lot from its example. The critical issues at hand were material selection and pattern execution. The thing to keep in mind is that its designer was not intending to pirate or anything like that. Regardless, even as an educational exercise, there are critical lessons to be had. The first one being material selection in so much as we’ve discussed it before, a rendition will hardly resemble the source of inspiration if one’s materials are not compatible et cetera. Anyway, no criticism of its maker is intended but that the item is critiqued makes this a sensitive topic. However regretfully, I can only post it in the forum. Looking forward to your comments.
Hm. . .just realized my ethical boundary doesn’t sit in the same spot. I’ve filed ‘making a single personal copy of a garment, and learning something from it’ in the same bin as ‘deconstructing something already made, and learning something from it’. Then again, I suppose if you’re intelligent enough to mentally tear it apart and physically reassemble it, you’re intelligent enough to do it in quarter-scale to prove the learning and not full scale for clothing yourself. Argh.
Kathleen, thank you for a very thought-provoking article. What I love about your blog is that for every one answer; it opens the door to about 10 more questions!
Again, the system is not publishing my comments and if I re-submit, it returns an error saying I already posted that. Does anyone know what the problem is?
Samantha: I don’t understand. I would consider my ethical boundaries to be similar to what you said. In fact, I frequently suggest people do similar things (the reverse engineering series) and have often mentioned that tear down assessments are a benchmark of world class manufacturers of every kind -not just apparel.
Re: quarter scale and don’t intend to go OT on you. I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of proofs in quarter scale (yes, even tho Vionnet did them) but was never able to articulate the reasons why. However, I just got a book that gives me the means to explain. I plan to review it soon.
Kathleen – try to look for and erase the cookie to your site. That might solve it. Don’t know what browser you’re using, methods are different for each?
I figured it out. Somehow, the system has flagged my comments as spam and they are going directly into the spam folder -which I almost never check. I only saw it this morning because I accidentally marked someone’s comment as spam so I had to go fish it out where I found them. Good to know! If the system is flagging my comments as spam and it’s my blog, who knows how many other comments have gotten similar treatment.