The Woman Who Tried to Robin Hood New York Fashion Week

The fashion industry has been accused of many things — from crimes of taste to actual crimes — but one thing it’s never been charged with is being too inclusive. Before it became Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend hunting grounds, New York Fashion Week (the first of the global fashion weeks) was created in 1943 expressly for the purpose of showcasing exclusively American designers to allay fears that lack of access to wartime France wouldn’t leave the public jitterbugging in overalls. These days, you’ll probably see more names that have little symbols over the letters than ones that don’t listed in the program, but they’re not exactly throwing their doors open to the huddled masses.

That pissed off Trisha Paravas. She had a passion for bringing clothes to the customer that flew in the face of Fashion Week’s invitation-only policy that granted access to only the richest and skinniest. That’s why, in 2013, she hatched a scheme. It turned out the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Endeavor Group Holdings, who produce New York Fashion Week, had never gotten around to trademarking the name, so Paravas took it off their hands. They raced to file their own trademark, but it was too late. Then they filed to cancel Paravas’s trademark on the grounds of “obviously,” but they were denied. Paravas began producing her own fashion shows that were open to all under the New York Fashion Week name and sued Endeavor for trademark infringement to the tune for $10 million.

It wasn’t a complete win for the little guy, and it was never going to be. The U.S. legal system doesn’t actually run on Air Bud-style technicalities, and Endeavor had a clear claim to the New York Fashion Week name. But for the next half decade, Paravas made their lawyers’ lives miserable. Her initial motion was denied on the basis that her trademark only afforded her the right to use the name for “online entertainment ticket agency sales” while Endeavor has the “broad ambit of organizing and producing fashion shows.” That didn’t stop Paravas from suing again a year later to prevent Endeavor from manufacturing New York Fashion Week branded makeup, prompting them to file their own claims that Paravas “had full knowledge of (Endeavor’s) prior rights in the famous New York Fashion Week and NYFW marks,” her company’s trademarks were “identical or nearly identical and confusingly similar in appearance, sound and meaning, to the (Endeavor) NYFW marks,” and also, seriously?

After spending several years locked in increasingly exasperating legal battles, the saga appears to have come to an end when Paravas and Endeavor reached a settlement at the end of 2020. Let’s hope she got extremely rich — and gave to the poor.