Designer Spotlight: Seema Anand of Blue Plate Fashion

Blue Plate Fashion specializes in original cotton prints with embroidery and other East Indian flourishes done in modern silhouettes. You’ve probably purchased a Blue Plate skirt or top at your favorite department store or boutique. But the trendy fashion line is branching out with a couture line just in time for the approaching holiday season.

During New York Fashion Week Spring 2008, I spoke with Seema Anand, Blue Plate’s head designer, inside the fashion house’s exotic showroom. The gracious designer tells me that the showroom, which has a gorgeous antique swing from India as its centerpiece, is modeled after the colorful and vibrant city of Little Jaipur.

Here are the highlights of our chat:

Question: Tell me about your couture line and what differentiates it from the regular Blue Plate fashion line?

Seema Anand: The regular line is mainly prints and 100 percent cotton and the couture line is satin and embroidery detailed work with crystals. The silhouettes are similar and the only difference is fabric and the embroidery, which makes it more special and slightly more expensive. I don’t see a big difference though. Couture is something you wear in the evening and special occasions but the customer is the same for both lines. The couture line is priced reasonably, even though we call it couture. The line retails from $75- $300. The line is for the holidays and evenings. The contemporary bride could wear the whites and the shorter dresses instead of a traditional gown.

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NYTimes - The Knockoff Won’t Be Knocked Off

THE drawstring anorak that Faran Krentcil considered buying one recent Friday at the Forever 21 store in Union Square was just like a signature look of the designer Stella McCartney. Ms. Krentcil, 26, the editor of a blog about fashion and style, was interested, particularly because the price of the knockoff — $35 — had several fewer digits.

She had sympathy for Ms. McCartney. She really did. “At the same time,” said Ms. Krentcil, who hunts for copies of designer looks at trendy stores to show on her Web site, Fashionista.com, “it is very understandable from a shopper’s perspective that this is happening. There is an anger that is seething in a lot of girls about the fact that they are shown image after image of these great clothes, but even the cheapest steals cost $180.”

In the struggle for control of fashion between those angry customers and the designers, the shoppers are winning. So much so that the Council of Fashion Designers of America has argued before Congress that high-end designers need legislation to protect them from knockoffs, which are showing up in stores faster and more frequently.

Yet critics — including some intellectual-property scholars and more mainstream clothing manufacturers — dismiss the notion that fashion needs protection. Copying, they say, is the normal, time-tested business model of the industry, in which the very idea of what becomes fashionable relies on the mass dissemination of trends.

And even if a law were warranted to protect the ideas and bank accounts of the designers, how would it work, anyway?

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NYTimes - Before Models Can Turn Around, Knockoffs Fly

Buyers from the nation’s leading department stores will sift through the work of hundreds of designers as another Fashion Week begins today in New York, seeking the looks that shoppers will want to wear next spring. Seema Anand will be looking for the ones they want right now.

Ms. Anand, who will be following the catwalk shows through photographs posted instantly on the Web, is a designer few would recognize, even though she has dressed more people than most of the famous designers exhibiting a few blocks from her garment district studio, under the tents in Bryant Park.

“If I see something on Style.com, all I have to do is e-mail the picture to my factory and say, ‘I want something similar, or a silhouette made just like this,’ ” Ms. Anand said. The factory, in Jaipur, India, can deliver stores a knockoff months before the designer version.

Ms. Anand compared a gold sequined tunic she created with a nearly identical one by the designer Tory Burch. Bloomingdale’s had asked her to make several hundred of the dresses for its private label Aqua, she said.

The Tory Burch dress sells for $750; Ms. Anand’s is $260.

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They say they love my ass in Seven Jeans, True Religion / I say no, but they keep givin’

The NYtimes details the work of a knock off fashion designer, Seema Anand, who literally takes pictures of items on runways and then has sowers in India make the clothes, getting them on the racks before the high end products hit their boutiques and high end clothing stores. Many of the designs are strikingly similiar, one might call them copies. But since only distinctive patterns (like Burberry’s) and logos are copyrighted - cuts, colors and designs are all fair game. The designers want to intervene and copyright their designs to fight the knocks offs. I’m unsympathetic — the purpose of copyright is to serve the public good, not the good of designers who want to sell dresses for 800 dollars. Are fewer high end clothes being made, are designs less adventurous and original? Also, how do you copyright a cut or design? What if a fashion innovation, like boot cut jeans, was copyrighted? Would the public be well served by one company making boot cut jeans for 100 years? One part of the article, however, illuminates the frustration for the high end designers and the opportunities for Anand:

“Some people don’t want to spend $300 on a pair of jeans just because of the name,” said Siovhan McGearey, 16, from London. “They may look nice, but why pay $300 when you can go down the street to Forever 21 and get jeans that are $30 that look exactly the same?”

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NewYorkCool.com - Think Pink Party

Drenched in pink, sparkle, glitter, and everything fabulous, the debut of Blue Plate Couture by Seema and Blue Plate Accessories had a successful launch party on August 22nd. The Think Pink event was held in the Blue Plate Showroom on Seventh Avenue and attracted a fashion-forward crowd. The haute monde was buzzing about the attention to detail, vibrant colors, and mega-watt shine in the seemingly endless supply of gorgeous frocks.

Designer Seema Anand commented, “I see a real need in the marketplace for high end pieces at reasonable prices. Everything in the Couture line is done by hand, and I strive to offer gorgeous eveningwear to young, fashionable women. My new line proves that you don’t have to break the bank to look fabulous.” Indeed, the interplay of patterns and bright hues certainly caught the eye of everyone in attendance of the launch party.

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