Prerequisites: None

Exam Type: No Exam

This experiential course is taught by Nana Sarian, a General Counsel in fashion and senior legal, business affairs and sustainability advisor of luxury brands, and Rebecca Harris, an associate in Gunderson Dettmer’s Boston office in the Licensing, Strategic Partnering & Commercial Transactions group.

Nana Sarian developed the Fashion Law Lab and has been teaching the course at HLS since 2017. Rebecca Harris has been part of the teaching team since the course commenced and is returning for her fourth year as Co-Lecturer.

The course will consist of interactive workshops featuring case studies on fashion law. Students will put themselves in the shoes of a lawyer advising a range of stakeholders in the fashion industry, working in small groups to tackle real legal challenges and scenarios faced by in-house and outside fashion counsel on a daily basis from the office and atelier to the runway, with a particular focus on legal analysis and problem solving. Topics will range from intellectual property (including the protection of fashion designs, focusing on the differences between protection in the US and EU), commercial law (including commercial arrangements to license the IP of a brand to third parties for the manufacture and sale of products which traditionally are not produced in-house by a brand, e.g. fragrance, beauty, sportswear), the laws relevant to fashion shows/presentations (covering matters as broad as design rights, fashion photographers and labor law), supply chains, human rights, animal rights, regenerative farming (with a focus on sustainability in fashion), the digital world (covering AI, digital influencers, NFTs and the metaverse) and social media.

Various international guest lecturers from the fashion industry will also be invited to present in class including Margaret Zhang (Editor in Chief of Vogue China), Claire Bergkamp (CEO, the Textile Exchange), Sneaker Law authors Kenneth Anand (former Head of Business Development and General Counsel of YEEZY) and Jared Goldstein (Legal Counsel LiveIntent, Undertone and Complex Media), Jeff Lee (lawyer, CEO and Co-Founder of DIBS Beauty), Yassine Saidi (business strategist, founder AGENC-Y, and collaboration expert), Ryan Leslie (Harvard University graduate, music producer, founder and CEO of SuperPhone and NextSelection Lifestyle Group), and Pier Luigi Roncaglia (an IP practitioner based in Italy who specializes in civil litigation in all areas of IP before all Italian courts, the General Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union as well as criminal litigation and anti-counterfeiting) as well as other guests specializing in environmental and social sustainability in fashion.

Note: This course will meet over 9 sessions on the following dates: January 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, and 17.