Prerequisites: None

Exam Type: No Exam

This experiential course meets January 4 to 14, 2022 and is taught by Nana Sarian, who served as General Counsel of Stella McCartney from 2012 to September 2021 and now continues to advise clients in luxury fashion with a focus on sustainability and Rebecca Harris, an HLS alum and an attorney at Goulston & Storrs in Boston whose practice focuses on Intellectual Property and various areas of Fashion Law.

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 brand, working in small groups to tackle real legal challenges and scenarios faced by in-house fashion counsels 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 or sportswear), contracts for sale (to wholesale and retail customers) as well as the laws relevant to fashion shows/presentations (covering matters as broad as design rights, music licensing, fashion photographers and labor law), supply chains (with a focus on environmental and social sustainability in fashion), the digital world and social media. Various international guest lecturers from the fashion industry will also be invited to present in class including 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), the authors of “Sneaker Law” (Kenneth Anand (former GC for Yeezy) and Jared Goldstein) as well as Yassine Saidi, an expert in sports and streetwear who has been responsible for collaborations with artists including the Weeknd and Rihanna.

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 returns this year as a Co-Lecturer.