What started as an innovative idea of Fordham Law professor Susan Scafidi—to create a special field of law for those working within a distinct industry—has gained respect within academia and is establishing a long-term direction for the industry. Since its launch in September of 2010, in fact, similar programs and courses have been launched at other institutions, including Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and New York University. (That irony is not lost on Scafidi, who is a pro at spotting a designer knockoff and who blogs at a site called counterfeitchic.com.)

“It’s been a real supernova,” said Scafidi, who also acts as the institute’s academic director. “We just keep managing to break new ground.”

Created in 2010, the nonprofit not only serves as a center to educate lawyers with a focus on fashion, but is “about something more,” Scafidi says—providing the fashion community with legal advice, training programs, and information about industry issues.

But it wasn’t an easy walk in this lawyer’s Manolos. Nearly 10 years ago, Scafidi’s idea to found the institute and the field of fashion law was ridiculed, with endless comparisons to Elle Woods in Legally Blonde.

“When I started this, people laughed. They said, ‘Really? It’s too girly, too frivolous. No one will take you seriously.’ It was like fashion law had a question mark after it,” she said. “But it is a multibillion-dollar industry… one that touches all of us, quite literally.”

In 2006, Scafidi convinced Fordham Law School to offer the first-ever fashion law seminar, under the condition that at least three students register. Much to everyone’s surprise, students frantically signed up.

“But we always realized it was more than just a class,” said Scafidi.

In just one year, enrollment doubled. It also became apparent to Scafidi that those outside of law school also needed services and that the industry needed legal protection and education.

Thanks to backing from the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and the support of CFDA president and iconic designer Diane von Furstenberg, the center became a reality on the same day in September 2010 that New York Fashion Week moved to its new home at Lincoln Center, just across the street from Fordham.

Since then, the institute has continued to expand, solidifying a permanent track at Fordham Law, now with seven classes ranging from Fashion Ethics, Sustainability & Development to Fashion Law & Finance, and bridging the gap between the fashion and legal communities.
“Everything happened because there was a need,” said Scafidi.

The nonprofit institute has now extended beyond Fordham, evolving into a fashion law epicenter with a monthly legal advice clinic called a “pop-up”—a nod to retail pop-up stores—where designers are paired with volunteer lawyers who are assisted by law students. There’s a summer Fashion Law Bootcamp (now in East and West coast editions thanks to a partnership with Levi’s®) and countless symposia open to lawyers and fashion professionals. The institute’s next daylong event is slated for this April 4.

“It’s like a foreign exchange program,” Scafidi said. “The lawyers have to learn to speak fashion and the fashionistas have to learn to speak law.”

The institute has become a regular fixture on the semiannual Mercedes-Benz New York Fashion Week calendar, where it offers students more than just a look at the business of fashion law—that is, real-life experience working with production legalities. At last September’s Fashion Week, the institute celebrated its third anniversary with a fashion show to showcase designers who participated in its clinics. One of the clinic’s designers, Eden Miller of Cabiria, made international headlines by showing the first-ever plus-size line under the tents.

During this spring’s Fashion Week, which runs from Feb. 6 through 13, the institute will host a Feb. 7 discussion of the latest fashion trend: wearable technology.

Scafidi has inspired fashion law committees at several New York bar associations and encouraged the establishment of three specialty law firms by program participants—one each in New York, London, and Paris. She helped found the Model Alliance and create a monumental state law protecting underage models, a law that took effect last November and which requires better adult supervision of child models on the job.

“I’m so proud of getting that law passed,” she said. “It’s wonderful to be able to help models who are the faces of the industry actually have a voice in the industry.”

With New York conquered, Scafidi is taking her idea global, having attracted students and program attendees “from every continent except Antarctica.”

“We’ve done a lot, but we’re not done yet,” she said, adding that she hopes to “continue establishing fashion law around the world”—with Milan, Hong Kong, and Dubai next up

Francis X. McAloon, S.J., associate professor of Christian spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University and Fordham’s Loyola Chair for the fall 2010 semester, discussed Hopkins’ work and how literary and religious scholarship supports a spiritual practice within his poetry.

Hopkins’ poems of consolation, such as “Pied Beauty” and “As kingfishers catch fire,” Father McAloon said, are representative of poetry throughout the Christian millennia that celebrate much of what is revered in the Psalms, such as:

“God, God’s love, God’s creation, our participation in that creation, our status as loved creation and our celebration and participation in the celebration, love, care of this creation,” Father McAloon said.

“I’m not saying Gerard Manley Hopkins necessarily was experiencing these deep levels of consolation while he was writing this poetry, although one could make an interesting argument along those lines, but it’s just really that we have access to these poems for our own prayer in the same way tradition invites us to pray with the poetry of the scriptures,” he continued.

The title of Father McAloon’s lecture, “Let Him Easter in Us,” comes from the final stanza of Hopkins’ poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”

“Hopkins loved to play with words, their meanings and usages. Here he uses the word “easter” in a way most of us are not familiar with. He’s turning it into a very active verb, an explosive, empowering verb,” Father McAloon said.

“‘Let Him Easter in Us,’ challenges us to the live ‘the real’ in light of an ongoing eruption of the presence and action of God in ourselves, in our relationships and in our world.”

Father McAloon proposed an interdisciplinary approach, informed by literary and religious scholarship, that allows for certain poems to function as texts for transformative prayer.

He then read from “Pied Beauty,” a shortened sonnet Hopkins wrote in 1877 while he was studying theology in Wales.

“What he is doing is offering us a sense of what it is he is glorifying God for,” Father McAloon said of the 11-line poem.

“It’s very clear that a primary sight for his experience with God is in nature,” Father McAloon said. “I propose that this is a classic example of a poem that could be prayed with while one is in spiritual consolation. This is the kind of poem that can come to mind and give expression to what we’re feeling.

“Part of what poetry does for us is give us words, phrases and images to express what we feel but perhaps cannot say because we’re not poets and we don’t have that same skill or technique,” he added.

Another Hopkins’ poem, “As kingfishers catch fire,” would reach out to us today, Father McAloon said.

“If you spend some time with this and think about your own experience of nature and of your own sense of Christ, faith, hope and love, it is—in its own way—an incredibly consoling claim or invitation to know ourselves, not simply as sinners, but to know ourselves as loved sinners and those who are called to live Christ-like lives,” said Father McAloon, who added most of his work on Hopkins until very recently focused on his sonnets of despair.

“Maybe it’s because I have deep, dark, Irish roots, but they always appealed to me and so it’s where I did most of my work as a graduate student and then the first 10 years of teaching,” he said. “Now I’ve decided to spend a little time on the consolation side of the spectrum.”