Copyright

When a great couturier gives a showing, he may be sure that many a lynx-eyed copyist will attend, that many a minor dressmaker will quickly ape his best creations. Like him, designers of furniture, china, fabrics, shoes, are subjected to constant "pirating" by less imaginative competitors. Their only protection now is to patent their designs--a procedure of years, during which their artful handiwork often becomes obsolete.

Last week the House Patents Committee considered a bill introduced by Representative William Irving Sirovich of New York, to allow designers to copyright their creations. A copyright is almost automatically secured by depositing a work of art (book, picture, music), and $2 with the Library of Congress. To prove that even shoes may be art, there appeared before the committee, last week, Mary Evelyn ("Fiji") Bendelari, 27, stubborn, fuzzy-haired Paris-New York shoe designer, originator of the Deauville sandal.

Opposed to the bill were representatives of the National Retail Dry Goods Association, who claimed that it would not limit protection only to original designs, but would make U. S. merchants liable to infringement charges on every household necessity, on every garment sold.

While she was fighting one battle in Washington, Miss Bendelari heard that she had won another in Paris, against no less impressive an opponent than the Svenska Taendsticksaktiebolaget, creditor of nations, holder of huge match monopolies (TIME, Oct. 28). The Swedish Match Trust had bought the building containing her tiny Paris shoe store facing the Place Vendome; she, shrewd, had refused to surrender her $150-a-year lease even when wreckers began to demolish the building. Last week the Trust capitulated, paid her $25,000 for her lease.

Once Miss Bendelari lived in Joplin, Mo. She went to school in Toronto: studied, worked at costume design in New York. In 1924, vacatoning in France, she learned that French shoes (broad, short) did not fit the feet (long, narrow) of U. S. women. To please them, she borrowed $1,000 from her father, set a solitary shoemaker to work with designs of her own. Among the most expensive in Paris, her shoes were immediately successful: for a while she was manager, packer, messenger, saleswoman; soon she had two factories in France, a small mauve-and-gold shop in Paris, a wholesale branch in New York. Her sandalmakers are cheap, her sales force is on commission; with small overhead, she has been making gross sales of $150,000 a year.

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