Drawing Fashion from the Factory System: Imitation at the Heart of the Creative Process

Whereas 'imitation' today is constantly invoked negatively and disparaged in the media as a harmful andreprehensible economic activity, seen as the opposite of 'originality', the relationship of innovation and imitation within intellectual property was not always thus. This article shows that 'imitation' was at the center of the creative process within eighteenth-century textile and fashion culture. To understand the development of fashion, the historian must put an end to simplistic dichotomies: technical and artistic drawing, for example. The artist and the craftsman must be newly conceptualised in their own terms and in their time. The multiplication of the so-called 'choses banales' (everyday things) such as the cheaper but gravitational clothing of the eighteenth century can partly beunderstood via a more appropriate study of the artist/craftsman which integrates the study in a more appropriate environment. Far from these dichotomies, a question can be posed: what happens when the notion of the 'fashion designer' is replaced with the model of the factory which upsets the schemata of manufacturing during the long eighteenth-century? The practices of interpretation, the recombining, reuse and customisation of patterns allow us to question concepts such as the originality or the copy. Is copyright or other such protection of the drawings of fashion really possible? © 2013 Taylor and Francis.