CHAPTER 7: Employment Law Issues in Fashion
Elise M. Bloom and Carole P. Sadler
Summary adapted from Chapter 7 of "Fashion Law: A Guide for Designers, Fashion Executives and Attorneys" edited by Guillermo C. Jimenez and Barbara Kolsun (Fairchild Books, 2010).
Federal and State employment laws that apply to the Fashion industry are the same laws that apply to all industries, but many of the occupations involved in the production and marketing of goods are unique to the industry. Chapter 7 provides a broad overview of employment law and concentrates on specific employment concerns in the fashion industry, particularly on discrimination, compensation, employment agreements and immigration issues when hiring foreign nationals.
Considering the Fashion Industry is mainly based on the principles of esthetics and stereotypes, it may lead to discriminatory practices that employers must clearly avoid. Discrimination Law constitutes a key point in the Fashion Industry: age, sex, and race are some of the forms of prohibited discrimination that fashion employers tend to disregard when establishing a policy for hiring their staff, and Courts tend to sanction this practice in a severe manner. Various cases on discrimination in the Fashion Industry, involving well-known companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch., L'Oreal and The Gap are presented by the authors illustrating a clear application of Discrimination Law in the fashion Industry.
The selection of Fashion models, is another issue that fashion designers should address carefully: they should avoid predominantly selecting for instance, blonde, white females as this might give rise to allegations of disparate impact discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity. Employers in the Fashion industry should also expose their models to a series of educational programs on eating disorders, following the guidelines established in the Health Initiative launched by the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) in 2007 to address the growing trend of underweight models. Though these guidelines are not binding for the industry, fashion companies around the world are applying these recommendations as a result of a global concern. Hiring underweight models is no longer acceptable for some companies in the Fashion Industry: The organizers of Madrid Fashion week in September 2006 promoted this practice after they decided to ban models with a body mass index of less than 18 and in December 2006, Italian Fashion designers formally agreed not to hire models under 16 and require all models to submit medical proof that they do not suffer from eating disorders.
The global nature of the business has turned hiring of foreign nationals into a common practice within the Fashion industry, therefore, Immigration Law issues are addressed by fashion employers every day. The key points on Immigration Law in fashion are presented at the end of the chapter, through a brief description of the different types of visas that an employer may need to sponsor in order to hire a foreign national.
This Chapter provides a general overview of the most important provisions that an employment agreement in the fashion industry must include in order to meet the needs of the contracting parties and it successfully sums up the various concerns of employers into practical guidelines on employment law.
Author details:
Elise M. Bloom
Proskauer Rose LLP
Carole P. Sadler
Coach, Inc.
Summary by: Margarita Serrano
