How to treat Dior products with China traditional flower-and-bird painting style patterns?

The pattern used by Dior, the so-called garden, comes from an embroidered tapestry in the smoking room of the same name, which was designed by decorator VictorGrandpierre for the home of Dior founder in Paris. The pattern must be related to the wallpaper and embroidery exported to Guangdong in 18- 19 century, but whether the tapestry itself is Cantonese embroidery or not is redesigned and made by French craftsmen at that time needs more textual research. Because such large-scale export embroidery is really rare.

Patents and copyrights protect civil rights. The beneficiary is a specific civil subject-individual or enterprise. Rather than a "country" with a non-civil subject. Whether it is a horse-face skirt or a flower-and-bird painting, when you file a lawsuit and ask for an apology, you must always find a specific civil subject. So, who is it? For example, Newton's three laws, such as geometric axioms and theorems, such as Arabic numerals from 0 to 9, can be used by anyone without declaring the source or paying fees. Most of the fonts, pictures and characters in your computer are still there. So, do you tag the author every time you use them? It is good to have awareness of cultural property rights and intellectual property rights, but it must be done.

Of course, another less likely situation is that this tapestry was customized in China in the 20th century, but even so, plagiarism and infringement cannot be directly identified. The reason is that most of these works belong to professional works, and their copyright is valid for 50 years after creation, not 50 years after the author's death. That is to say, in most cases, the copyright protection period of this pattern has been extended, unless Grandpierre ordered it directly from a Chinese embroidery master and did not draw up an order through any unit in the mid-20th century.

However, it should be noted that it is generally a post-colonial concept, and the protection objects are mainly the cultures and traditions of a few businessmen and aborigines. Against the background of China's historical development, this concept is increasingly inapplicable to us. Moreover, although the concept of cultural appropriation can also be applied to the issue of horse-faced skirts to claim their rights, this concept does not apply to the issue of flowers and birds in Guangdong embroidery. The reason is that these Guangdong embroidery works spread to Europe in a proper way, and at the same time they were integrated into European culture, forming the artistic style and taste of Chinese style. However, when explaining the product, they concealed this history.

At the same time, for those works that can't restrain the ordinary audience from producing public works images through the ticket purchase instructions of art galleries, such as the Eiffel Tower and various old buildings, France can avoid the loss of copyright of related works images by supporting local exhibitions of new art. The most notorious case is the light show of the Eiffel Tower, claiming that although the copyright protection period of the tower has expired, the lighting arrangement on it is the latest works.

We can find that the methods of European developed countries to protect their own cultures and traditions are very modern and rational. They neither persuade others not to misappropriate by claiming that they can also be a weak culture, nor simply wave a big stick to prevent others from misappropriating. This is a question that we need to think about in the future. After john galliano, Dior also produced several works with Chinese style, but in fact, until the recent two events, it was inspired by European Chinese style art rather than China art. So why don't big brands claim that their inspiration comes from China? Do we need to reflect on this?

I understand that people may be angry when they see this, as if it is useless to argue. Don't worry, the angrier is yet to come. What we should pay attention to is actually the measures promulgated by France to protect local culture and traditions, as well as the practices of its cultural institutions and private cultural organizations. France practices the principle of blood and sweat in the protection of intellectual property rights, such as a public painting. By regularly asking photographers to remake it, the image copyright of the work can be greatly extended, and even the above effect can be achieved by establishing a database.

On the contrary, I don't think it is necessary to reflect. Under the current international situation, it is a way for big brands to legally choose the China source of their hidden works, which is a way to give consideration to the China market and the European and American markets, because China is not what it used to be, not a fascinating foreign land, but a behemoth that approaches the mainstream culture in Europe and America, and even tries to surpass it in one fell swoop. In fact, it is not necessarily a good thing to claim that the inspiration for a certain work comes from China. On the contrary, it is often a kind of cultural bullying and cultural colonization. In other words, the development of China has brought these phenomena, which is inevitable. We are sleeping from the illusory side and gradually moving towards the center. In this process, there must be voices of opposition. But that's it? Not exactly. As a China person, I want to propose a new attitude.

In this kind of incident, all the inequalities we encounter today come from the imbalance of copyright protection. Different from Europe, China does not stick to works in the public domain, which makes our ancient culture available to European brands at will. On the contrary, when our entrepreneurs want to use European culture and art, they are afraid that they have infringed copyright, and even take pride in the authorization of European institutions, playing the brand of European and American culture and building their own brand image. This method is passive.

Therefore, on the one hand, it seems that we need to establish a national database to regulate the free use of China's art and culture by European brands. On the other hand, it is also possible to take the initiative to directly steal European works of art on the premise of avoiding infringement of goodwill. Moreover, this misappropriation is not to render foreign countries, but to reveal their culture and examine western history and culture from the height of human nature.

Compared with what brands people resist buying, it is more fun to play with European history in the cultural field and rewrite European history with bad but cool cultural products. For another example, in the field of design, we can learn from the redesign idea of Italian group Alchimia, and make some new tricks to play with and transform their cultural heritage by means of material replacement and function transfer on the basis of directly misappropriating European and American designs in Foshan factory.

These are all worth thinking about. For domestic brands, it is meaningless to rely on European and American culture and art to build brand power. It might be more interesting if we also go to the card table, misappropriate each other and play bad games with each other. So don't be angry about these things. True cultural self-confidence does not care about the theft of one or two works, but actively plays cards with each other, prevents cultural comprador from defending the rights of European public works, and lets play back and forth with each other.