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 sixth 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. They will 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, (with a focus on sustainability in fashion), the digital world (covering AI, NFTs and the metaverse) and social media.

Guest lecturers from the fashion industry will also be invited to present in class.