Some of you may remember how Hardy Amies' Autumn/Winter 2012-13 collection was inspired by the choreographies and the aerial shots in Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1933. The director came back to my mind after I saw some images of Moncler Gamme Rouge's S/S13 collection.
Banally inspired by Italian seaside resort Positano - the sort of inspiration that means for Dolce & Gabbana successful sales to foreign buyers - the collection by Giambattista Valli for Moncler featured also dresses with prints of the sea and two designs with prints of synchronized swimmers. The latter actually looked like digital manipulations of some kind of footage from the "By A Waterfall" segment in Busby Berkeley's 1933 film Footlight Parade.
I'm almost positive it can't be an image from an Esther Williams movie since the swimmers printed on the garments in the Moncler collection wear rather simple swimsuits, while in Williams' water extravaganza films there were usually more frills, ruffles and appliqued motifs.
In Hardy Amies' collection we had a re-elaboration of an idea and if you owned the rights of the film you couldn't have said the designer had "stolen" your images since the abstract broken glass-like motifs may have derived from a choreography/aerial shot seen in that film or from a digital image inspired by geometry, but, in this case the situation is different, especially if the image of the swimmers is taken from a specific film/episode and no rights were paid to use it.
I already raised the question of who owns the copyright of the images of assorted artworks used as prints in other collections and I hope that one of these days we will start being more clear about the images used in a collection, otherwise we will give the wrong perceptions to young fashion students, making them believe that it is perfectly fine to use for commercial collections images downloaded from Tumblr, selected from films or simply edited from pieces randomly picked from the archive of the maison you're working for (example: Hedi Slimane for Saint Laurent...).
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