No Butts about it

North Face has no sense of humor when copy right is parody’d


http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/stor...

I hope these take St. Louis by storm. I’m tempted to buy one just because I love the underdog parody conflict. The North Face has been around as a brand for decades. Their stuff has long been a favorite of mountaineers, backpackers, rock jocks, and now has achieved pop-culture status.

I have a North Face down parka that is now 25 years old. I wear it happily when I have the chance. There’s nothing like wrapping a down parka around you and feeling the world inside become instantly warmer. I kept this parka through the years we lived in Florida because it was too good and too expensive to pass on to a thrift store. Wise choice on my part. The best mountaineering tents made, are sold by The North Face.

Below, photographs of my favorite North Face copyright infringement.

This was a birthday gift from Gloria. It blends one of my favorite musical groups, San Francisco’s The Grateful Dead with The North Face, also of San Francisco. In all the years since she gave it to me, I’ve only seen one other copy of this shirt. That happened in June of this year in Asheville NC.

Yvon Chouinard, rock climber, mountaineer, blacksmith, adventurer, fly fisher, founded a clothing company called “Patagonia.” Patagonia’s real claim to fame was its absolutely bomb-proof nature. It was designed to be worn as protection in extreme conditions. Chouinard traveled around the world, putting his clothing to the final test. So did lots of people who bought the clothing. Every catalog featured pictures of people displaying Patagonia clothing worn to the point of destruction. It was marketed to the same niche as North Face and also found a home on steel workers, ranchers, commercial fishers, and all sorts of people who needed clothing to keep them warm and dry when the outside world is filled with wind and water, liquid or frozen.

In 1982 I bought a Patagonia shelled fleece bomber jacket. It did an excellent job of defeating wind. I managed to stain it with X-C ski wax, the klister type that sticks to everything and stains everything. The only way to remove the stain would have been to cut it out. I also managed to burn the fleece collar when I was still smoking. It left a hard, uncomfortable hole that reminded me that the jacket was nearly all plastic at heart. I wore it many winters until the shell became so thin that it no longer turned wind. I packed up the jacket with other old clothes and donated it to a thrift store, along with a North Face back pack that had lost all its waterproof coating, a Sierra Designs tent that was also no longer water repellent, and a down sleeping bag that I had purchased used from someone who bought it used from a outfitting store that had rented it to campers for a season. It too had served me well but after being injured and surgicized repeatedly, my backpacking days, according to my neurosurgeon, were behind me.

I replaced the jacket with a shelled Nautica jacket that is quite functional, reversible, and can shed its sleeves to make a vest. I wear it that way most often. But it will never be the jacket it replaced.

Why tell this tale? Patagonia had a copyright run-in also.

A Boulder CO small business, J-Rat, made rock climbing equipment in the late 1980’s. They chose to make and sell a shirt which contained a humorous parody of Patagonia’s mountain logo. They used the term “Ratagonia” to make the parody gel. The t-shirt, available in garish colors so that the wearer would be highly visible if he or she peeled off and cratered while climbing, had volcanoes exploding, rocks falling, and rats galore instead of the stately peaks Chouinard’s products boasted.

Things being things, the tale proceeds as follows:

A Patagonia employee purchased a Ratagonia shirt and wore it to work. The shirt was brought to Chouinard’s attention. He was not amused, called his attorney, and J-Rat received a “cease and desist” letter. J-Rat, made new shirts, same front but with a copy of the letter on the back. Chouinard, source of a major improvement in climbers’ ice axes, resisted the urge to re-enact the death of Lev Davidovich Bronstein in Mexico City. His lawyers began to earn their retainer and J-Rat did stop selling the shirts. I used to have one. It no longer fit, was badly worn out, and , like my Great Pacific Ironworks t-shirt from a Chouinard predecessor of Patagonia, it went with the tent, the pack, jacket, and all.



The last shirt that this St. Louis argument brings to mind is one marketed by Richland WA high school.

Richland and surrounds are in near proximity to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The Richland high school adopted a mushroom cloud mascot and used the slogan, “Nuke ‘em till they glow.” Since Hanford was the major employer in the region, this glance to the source of revenue was understandable, particularly when one realizes that Hanford produced Pu-239 that produced many of the U.S.’ s arsenal of warheads. The slogan was not at all uncommon among SAC air crews and others from the military who worked with special weapons.

Richland High School apparently caught sufficient flack in the middle 1980s as to cause them to change their mascot and motto to something less violent and nuclear. I happened to see an article in National Geographic that mentioned the school and its t-shirts. I managed to buy one before they were no longer available. It arrived, had a suitably science fiction nuclear glow green color and a phosphorescent mushroom cloud emblazoned on the front. Yes, it did glow in the dark.

I don’t recall how I parted ways with that shirt. It may have gone the same route as the Ratagonia shirt.

We’ve got a lot of Grateful Dead t-shirts with various concert dates, designed to recall various songs. Too many of them have huge overlays and can rapidly become too hot to wear. We keep talking about resecting the shirts and making the front and back into the sides of a quilt. That’s not an original idea, we’ve seen someone’s on-line offer to make such quilts. But Gloria has a sewing machine and may someday decide to undertake the project. She’s a good enough seamstress and I have good scissor skills. I can still wield scissors, hemostats, and cut suture with one hand while holding something else with the other.

Long ago, when I first met Gloria. She’s wearing a Chinese New Year show t-shirt and I’m wearing one of my favorites, stylized view of the San Francisco Bay area.

I hope the young man selling South Butt shirts makes a bundle. He’s not going to hurt North Face’s business. They long ago made the shift from meeting niche market needs to selling popular fashion items to people who are more interested in the label than the quality. It happens to too many companies. Abercrombie and Fitch was once a high end men’s store. I bought a very nice button down collar dress shirt in a store in Tyson’s Corner VA and wore it when we were married. The next time I set foot into an Abercrombie and Fitch they had no dress clothes and had made the move to selling labels to teen agers who will never paddle a canoe, cast a fly line, or play lacrosse. When companies venture that far from their roots niche, the next step is selling their label in Wal-Mart.

I may have to send for a South Butt shirt myself.

High near 70 today, mostly cloudy. Gloria brought her tortoise inside for the winter. I’ve got steaks marinating in a chimmichuri blend. I’ll grill them for dinner.

We spoke with my mother in Jefferson City today. Gloria’s brother, Shea, called from Marrakesh with exquisite timing. It’s been a very good day today and I’ve got a smile on my face that only Gloria can initiate.

Library trip tomorrow. The dog is barking at more trucks than usual tonight. The humming birds are still here, haven’t begun to migrate south yet.

Loki's favorite slepping position