South Korea's Designers Face a Counterfeit Crisis
Munsoo Kwon’s design (left) Vs Online store’s design (right)
Image: Munsoo Kwon
Seoul, South Korea, As one of Asia’s most popular destinations for fashion, Seoul is home to a large number of consumers who have a thirst for luxury brands and a growing interest in products created by their own booming local fashion industry that is strongly supported by the government. As designers from Seoul and Seoul Fashion Week continue to gain more popularity both domestically and abroad, so does the desire of the local market to have easy and cheap access to Korea’s most popular brands.
Leading luxury brands such as supreme, Vetements, Thom Browne, Off White and more have been victim Seoul’s counterfeit clothing crisis in recent years. Sales of their counterfeit products spike at an all time high during Seoul Fashion Week. Situated across the road from the event’s main venue Dongdaemun Plaza (D.D.P) is an open market full of merchants from some of Seoul’s most popular areas hoping to make a few thousand won off style setters are eager to wear some of the season’s hottest street style pieces from abroad. The counterfeit crisis has become such an Issue that it may be affecting Korea’s reputation to the luxury brands it’s consumers desire as some are beginning to see no point in opening stores in Seoul due to copies of their goods being so readily available to the masses making their products less exclusive and desirable.
In recent months the dynamics of Seoul’s counterfeit culture has shifted. The growing popularity of local brands proves to have become more detrimental than rewarding for designers who are now facing the same crisis their luxury counterparts have been facing for years. One would assume that a country who promotes their local designers and tries its best to put them on to the world stage would have firm law’s set in place to protect them from such counterfeit culture. On the surface, Korea’s design protection law seemed like the perfect solution. According to an academic journal by Yonsei University’s Eunjo Ko Christine Kim on A Study on the Legal Protection of Fashion Design: Comparison between Korea and the United States. The Korean design protection Law was put in place to “ensure that If a certain design is recognized under design protection law, the designer may exercise his/her absolute and exclusive design right. In other words, design protection law can be considered legislation that can be exercised to strongly protect fashion design. However, the problem lies in the procedural requirements that make it extremely difficult for the designer to enjoy protection under the design protection law in practice.”
Ulkin’s Fall Winter 2018 design (left) VS Online Store’s design (right)
Image: Ulkin
These issues, as well as other loopholes, have made it incredibly difficult for popular local brand’s such as UL:KIN and Munson Kwon to take legal action against the hordes of online stores that have released exact replicas of pieces from their recently released Fall-Winter collections. “ It is difficult for a designer to register each and every garment he or she creates and even if a design is registered there are many ways in which one who wishes to copy the design can avoid legal repercussions. For example, If the length or other small details of the original garment are adjusted and or changed this might not be considered copying a design by law. ” Says Ul:kin’s Jayong Chun.
With the complications that counterfeit laws present brands have taken to social media to call out their copycats posting side by side images of their design and the copy, hashtagging words such as “copy” and “the same” in Korean whilst directly tagging the stores selling their counterfeit pieces. This has resulted in a wave of support from local bloggers, celebrities and fashion insiders who have condemned these actions in the comments section of Instagram.
Will the power of social media and the backlash it creates be enough to make designers voices heard by those in power to strengthen laws and the consumers who are buying the counterfeits of their designs? Or will designers have to find other means to ensure their creations are protected? For now, it seems there is no clear solution to this problem and only time can tell to what extent the ramifications of this issue will have on all parties involved.
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ARTICLE WRITTEN BY JOURDIE
Annotations:
Christine Kim & Eunju Ko (2011) A Study on the Legal Protection of Fashion Design: Comparison between Korea and the United States, Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, 2:2, 104-113, DOI: 10.1080/20932685.2011.10593088
Personal interview with Jayong Chun, February 12, 2019