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Luxury fashion brands are using increasingly aggressive methods as they step up their battle against the army of high street copycats who steal their most coveted designs.
Jimmy Choo, the shoemaker to the stars, has trumpeted the latest victory in the war against the fashion plagiarists who cost the industry tens of millions of pounds in lost sales each year.
The company found that the high street chain Oasis and Jane Shilton, a leather specialist, had been copying the designs of two of its hottest shoes for summer 2007: a silver leather and cork wedge and a flat, gold Grecian-style sandal.
Adopting the same approach that has seen it triumph against retailers including Marks & Spencer and New Look, Jimmy Choo instructed lawyers at Shoosmiths to fight the design infringements and won.
Tamara Mellon, who runs Jimmy Choo, has an irate customer to thank for her victory against Oasis.
Having paid 355 pounds ($941.59) for a pair of the metallic wedges, the woman was less than pleased to spot an almost identical pair on sale at Oasis for 50 pounds and emailed Jimmy Choo.
Within a few weeks, Oasis, part of the Icelandic investor Baugur's clutch of UK brands, had withdrawn the shoes and paid thousands of pounds in damages.
Hannah Merritt, the shoemaker's head of legal affairs, said: "We've taken an aggressive approach because unless you hit their pockets they won't take a blind bit of notice."
Its biggest coup was getting the fashion chain New Look to stump up 80,000 pounds in damages for copying a design last autumn.
Last year Marks & Spencer had to pay up after it copied one of Jimmy Choo's handbags.
A report into the counterfeit industry this week by the law firm Davonport Lyons highlighted the scale of the problem.
It warned that shoppers view "lookalikes" as a "benevolent force" that make designer wear "more affordable".
Just 39 per cent of people questioned for the survey believed that lookalikes damage brands, compared with 55 per cent who thought fakes damage brands.
Nevertheless, Chloe, the French design house where Stella McCartney made her name, takes a similar attitude to Jimmy Choo.
This week it triumphed against Sir Philip Green's Topshop, which was accused of copying a lemon yellow dungaree dress in Chloe's summer collection.
Topshop had to pay more than 13,000 pounds in damages and destroy almost 2,000 dresses.
To push home its message, Chloe's parent company, Swiss luxury goods giant Richemont, is backing a new website called myauthentics.com to help consumers to spot fakes.
Lawyers for Jimmy Choo and Chloe say it pays for luxury brands to fight design infringements because it scares off other potential copycats.
Gary Assim, partner at Shoosmiths, says: "It helps to reinforce the brand and give it extra cachet."
Experts blame the increase in knock-off designs on the UK's booming value retail sector, which is worth 8 billion pounds.
Susan Scafidi, who edits counterfeitchic.com and is a law professor at New York's Fordham University, says: "The big culprits are the large, fast fashion companies, which prowl the world of high fashion in search of designs that can be copied easily, quickly and cheaply."
Sweden's H&M took Primark to task for copying some of its designs last year.
And Primark was also in hot water with Monsoon for reproducing six of its skirts and tops.
The head of Anti-Copying in Design, which helps to fight copyright theft, Dids Macdonald, believes culprits should face bigger penalties.
She said: "Damages should be exemplary to provide a deterrent. They don't go far enough."
- INDEPENDENT
