Johanna Zanon

PhD Candidate
University of Oslo

Johanna Zanon is a PhD candidate at IAKH, University of Oslo, and she is also affiliated at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. She is particularly interested in the history of fashion, business history and history of the decorative arts. Her PhD consists in a diachronic study of the general and artistic management of the French couture houses Jean Patou, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Madeleine Vionnet, from their creation to nowadays. After completing her master degree in History of the European Art at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 2011, she obtained her degree of archivist-paleografer at Ecole nationale des Chartes in 2012, with a research conducted on the house of Jean Patou in the interwar years. She is also an occasional contributor to the online Fashion Research Network.

Abstract

New battle for old names: empowering 'sleeping beauties' through intellectual property rights. Madeleine Vionnet, Jean Patou, and Elsa Schiaparelli (1980s-2010s).

Sleeping beauties were once world-renowned couture houses. For varying reasons, they had to close their doors until new business players awoke them from a long lethargy. Unlike major luxury firms, sleeping beauties do not primarily use copyright law to prevent counterfeiting – their names having been forgotten for decades. However, purchasing a brand and registering the trademark worldwide constitutes the first step of this business model, which was scarce in the late 1980s and became an overcrowded market a decade later. An intensified copyright battle stemmed from the arrival of businessmen keen on restoring the image of bygone glories, together with the arrival of intermediaries eager to resell the brands at the highest bidder.

This empirical study through a cross-analysis of Madeleine Vionnet, Jean Patou, and Elsa Schiaparelli, interrogates when a brand is ready to be revived, and what makes it revivable: in a nutshell, how a designer’s name becomes a brand to trade. Beyond the hard competition, the talk postulates that copyright law is used by sleeping beauties as a way to counter a lack of legitimacy due to the disappearance of the original designer. The immaterial value – historical, patrimonial, and symbolic – of a dormant high fashion brand provides a communication asset to their managers. Sleeping beauties’ storytelling lies in the crossroad between expectations and forgetfulness from the customer. This talk draws on a series of interviews with managers and former managers of sleeping beauties, archives of the same firms, trademarks in French and international law, legal publications, and press cuttings.