On a lighter note, it seems that at a holiday reception at the White House this week, four women wore the same red dress. One of those women was Laura Bush. The gracious hostess fled, changed, and came back. She did not, evidently, offer other dresses to her humiliated guests. The story is going around; I happened across Coffee Em’s social advice.
Oh, the dress? Oscar de la Renta, red, quite attractive, $8,500. The very rich are not like you and me.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
says the man with the $3600 suit…
Coffee Em’s take on it was much what I imagine your response was — doesn’t the hostess make the problem worse by changing her dress? Though Laura Bush isn’t going to make any of them feel better by pretending that it’s not an unhappy circumstance — the idea that no two women should wear the same dress is fairly well established, and our First Ladies no longer set the fashion.
In “proper” circles (the circles far removed from my own, where men all own tuxes), two gentlemen at a formal event may well wear the same tux. Is there embarrassment if they also wear the same non-black tie or vest or cummerbund? Or do they simply never wear anything but black?
And why is it ok (or even expected) for bridesmaids to all wear the same dress?
I don’t think that Laura Bush really could have done anything to make it Not an Issue, mostly because the Issue was not primarily the comfort of the ladies in question at the moment in question, but the representation of the faux pas in the papers the next day. And the next week; it was in my local paper this morning.
As for the lack of gentlemanly embarrassmentosity, you are forgetting the cardinal rule of fashion: women’s fashion must be evil, and must embarrass the woman. Men don’t enter into it. There is no pointless rule about embarrassing men for something that has nothing to do with anything they did. Women, on the other hand, must assume all shame and discomfort for anything anybody does. Therefore, two men who find themselves wearing the same accessory may simply congratulate each other on their good taste. Women who wear the same accessory must apologize for their … um, what exactly?
Thanks,
-V.
For their good taste?
So trademark law is really about treating companies like women. A company shouldn’t wear the same trade dress as another company, at least if they are going to the same market at the same time.
Companies are assumed to have fair warning to be able to avoid this problem through a hybrid system of trademark registrations (for registered marks), research on the marketplace (for unregistered marks), and common knowledge of famous marks. Does this approach provide a guide to avoiding infringing fashion?
It should at least be easy to avoid infringing on the First Lady’s dress if her press secretary and social office are doing their job as a dress registry by informing the media and callers what the First Lady is expected to wear. (Mothers of the bride and groom similarly avoid wearing the same dress by announcing their intentions in advance.) It’s harder to see how guests could be expected to avoid duplicating each other unless the host is taking on the responsibility of a complete dress registry, as might be done for food at an organized pot luck.
In some seriousness, the actually gaffe is wearing a dress that comes off the rack. The assumption is that each lady at such an event wears a unique dress, handbeaded by Romanian gnomes, designed by Cimabue clones (which is what the stem-cell research is all about), and woven from the very fabric of space-time. Then, when somebody else shows up wearing the exact same dress, it reveals that actually, you went back in time, upsetting the nature of causality and stealing the design from the Dragon Who Guards the Cloth of Gold, you know, the dragon that killed your grandfather when he was a boy, thus unraveling the, um, shouldn’t unravelling have two lls?
Thanks,
-V.
ordinarily the dress is $17,000, but there it was, half off, red tagged in filene’s penthouse, and nobody could resist. the most embarrassing part was that the first lady’s shiner came from lady z‘s elbow in the scrum.