See What Tom Ford Said About Fashion & Creativity
Ready to Share asks whether the fashion industry offers a compelling model for other creative industries to explore and emulate. Are technological developments – digitization, cheap and easy replicability – propelling the emergence of a “creative commons” in any case, no matter what content industries prefer?
Ready to Share looks beyond the familiar concept of fashion trends to explore how creativity emerges, circulates and evolves in the fashion industry – and in contemporary culture more generally.
This landmark conference on creativity and ownership in the fashion industry was presented by the Lear Center’s Creativity, Commerce & Culture project, and sponsored by The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising/FIDM. Ready to Share explored the fashion industry’s enthusiastic embrace of sampling, appropriation and borrowed inspiration, core components of every creative process. The event featured provocative trend forecasts, sleek fashion shows and an eclectic mix of experts from the fashion, music, TV and film industries.
To date, this project has produced three research reports and continues to offer a rich foundation for subsequent conference presentations like Fashion and the Democracy of Style.
Watch the exceptional RTS video sessions.
Read biographies of the panelists at the RTS conference:
- Cate Adair, costume designer for Desperate Housewives
- Rose Apodaca, West Coast Bureau Chief, Women’s Wear Daily
- John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation
- T Bone Burnett, musician and producer
- Ted Cohen, Senior Vice President of Digital Development & Distribution, EMI Music
- Danger Mouse, creator of the Grey Album
- Tom Ford, former Creative Director for Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent
- Kevan Hall, fashion designer and former Design and Creative Director for Halston
- Kevin Jones, Curator of the FIDM Museum
- Marty Kaplan, Director of the Norman Lear Center and Annenberg School Associate Dean
- Rick Karr, television correspondent and writer
- Michael Patrick King, executive producer of HBO’s Sex and the City
- Norman Lear, producer and director
- Booth Moore, Los Angeles Times fashion critic
- Richard Nichols, producer for The Roots
- Sam Phillips, Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter
- Sheryl Lee Ralph, actress, singer, director and producer
- Cameron Silver, President of Decades; creative consultant for Azzaro, Paris
- Rani Singh, Director of the Harry Smith Archives & Senior Research Associate at the Getty Research Institute
- Jonathan Taplin, Professor, USC Annenberg School for Communication; TV and film producer
- Guy Trebay, New York Times style reporter
- Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Culture and Communication at New York University; author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity
- David Wolfe, Creative Director of the Doneger Group