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  Seamstress takes on might of Chanel over crochet pattern |
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• Claim for €2.5m damages could shake up industry• Fashion house denies it stole small firm's designA 61-year-old woman from a small town in eastern France is taking on the might of one of world's greatest fashion houses in a case that threatens to shake up the way the industry treats its skilled workers.Carmen Colle, a former social worker who founded an ethical clothing company to provide employment for refugees, is waging a legal battle against Chanel over a crochet pattern which she claims was copied by designers at Rue Cambon.Arguing that the sample was created by her own tailors and not by her former client, she is pushing for €2.5m (£2.2m) of damages for alleged counterfeit and breach of contract.
Chanel insists the design was its own.The case, which has taken four and a half years to come to court, is being watched closely by observers of the high fashion industry, who believe it could empower the petits mains who work as tailors and seamstresses for powerful brands in France.Although businesses such as Colle's World Tricot, which supply handmade haute couture to some of fashion's leading names, often suggest ideas for designs, they rarely - if ever - ask for copyright, preferring to be given a large order from the client.If Colle, who claims Chanel used her pattern without placing an order, wins her fight, she believes it could have widespread repercussions."It is not just World Tricot at stake.
It is the recognition of small businesses and their creations," she said.
"[Big names] treat us as things they can take up and then throw away.
It's a shame for them.
The greatness of a country, and the greatness of a brand, is the respect it shows for its petits mains."Colle, whose erstwhile clients include Christian Dior, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Givenchy, said life had been "a descent into hell" since the legal battle began.She contacted them in 2004 after she spotted a cardigan in a Tokyo boutique whose crochet pattern, she claims, bore a striking resemblance to one designed by her staff.
Chanel insists it was an idea dreamed up in its own creation studio.Since she lodged her official complaint, World Tricot has suffered.
From a thriving company with around 90 staff and annual sales of €1.9m in 2004-5, it has become a "very, very fragile" set-up battling to stay afloat, she said.Because of the lawsuit, banks have refused to help her, former clients have disappeared and she has had to lay off all but a dozen employees, she added.
"You cannot imagine what it is like," she said, claiming she had been subjected to a strategy of "pressures and manipulation".
"You are faced with an enormous machine.
You become the guilty party."Chanel denied the allegations.
"The making of a crochet sample on the basis of precise instructions given by Chanel's creative studio does not mean that a pattern's creation can be claimed," a spokeswoman said.In turn, she said, Chanel had asked Paris's commercial court to rule on what the illustrious business describes as World Tricot's "blatant denigration" of its name.Colle, who since founding World Tricot in 1990 has trained and given work to dozens of political refugees and immigrants from north Africa, said she was motivated chiefly by a desire to win justice for those people.During the period leading up to the trial she has been plunging her energies into making her own fashion brand, Angèle Batist, a success.She held its first catwalk show and opened a boutique in Paris earlier this year.
She remains stoic.
"I will try to carry on," she said.
"Whether they find me right or wrong, I have done all I can.
Now it's for them to decide."Luxury brand's privileged positionChanel is as much a part of the French national identity as a gallic shrug or a bottle of Bordeaux; the logo of interlocking Cs almost as strongly identifiable as a symbol of Paris as the Eiffel Tower itself.For the past quarter century the label has been designed by Karl Lagerfeld, but this has in no way detracted from the label's strong French flavour: quite the contrary, since Lagerfeld has more than made up for his own shortcomings (he is German) by paying tribute to Parisian style to an almost fetishistic degree, weaving symbols of French style such as the striped Breton top into the very fabric of Chanel by including them in consecutive collections.All this is surface image, of course, but there is substance beneath.
Eight years ago, at a moment when the traditional skills of haute couture seemed in very real danger of dying out after mechanisation and mass production had decimated the labour-intensive arts which once flourished in fashion, Chanel bought five specialist 'ateliers' to ensure their survival.At Lemarie, silk flowers are made by hand and feathers attached to hems with tweezers and silk thread.
Lesage is where the world's most exquisite embroidery is done.
Desrues is a costume jeweller, Massaro is a shoemaker, and Michel a millinery workshop.
The ateliers are now underwritten by Chanel, but produce work for the runways of Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior and Balenciaga and others.This was no act of charity but a shrewd move that fortified Chanel's position on the fashion chess board.
By buying the ateliers, the Wertheimer family who own Chanel ensured that Lagerfeld would have the world's most highly skilled collaborators at his disoposal.More importantly, perhaps, they also forged a strong association between Chanel and traditional fashion skills in France in the same way that the name Savile Row is synonymous with the equivalent in Britain.
This has also placed Chanel in a position of patrician privilege in relation to the skilled fashion workforce in France - a position Carmen Colle accuses them of exploiting.Jess Cartner-Morley
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