The problem here is the judge, not necessarily Chanel. There’s a number of interesting quirks about the fashion industry that may make you more sympathetic of their tactics.
First, fashion designs are not only un-patentable, but they can’t even be copyrighted. Think about that for a second: if you design a piece of clothing, it’s not your design—anybody can simply start creating and selling exact copies and there is nothing you can do legally to stop them. If you write a book, record a piece of music, make a movie, take a photograph, paint a painting, or write a piece of software, your creative expression is protected by copyright and nobody can copy the form of what you’ve done. This is not true for fashion designs.
People routinely criticize luxury goods for being emblazoned with logos, and I often hear geeks put down consumers of luxury goods for being stupid enough to buy things with someone’s logo all over it. But given the complete lack of legal protection afforded to the designers, the logos in part came about so that the products could be protected under trademark law instead: they’ve got logos all over them because there’s no other good, reliable way to protect their work from being knocked off!
Incidentally, another thing I often hear professed snickeringly as proof of the triviality of fashion is the fact that trends change so quickly—new designs are pushed out many times a year and maintaining a highly fashionable wardrobe is like trying to stand on quicksand. This, again, isn’t necessarily for any insidious reason or because consumers are stupid—it’s simply because the good designs are knocked off almost immediately and unless new ones are pushed out constantly it’s difficult to, in the consumer’s mind, differentiate oneself from and stay ahead of the copiers.
But even if the above weren’t true, most luxury goods are qualitatively better products anyways. They’re better made and better designed. I knew someone once who had a Louis Vuitton wallet that their mother had handed down to them, originally purchased in the 60s, that was still in 100% perfect condition after constant use fifty years later. Take a look at your wallet and think about whether you expect it to be in one piece fifty years from now.
A Chanel suit is made with a hell of a lot more than $20 worth of materials and time, but even if it weren’t it’s irrelevant. Everyone here A/B testing their SaaS apps at wildly different price points should know it’s meaningless what the marginal cost of the goods are—what matters is how much you can sell them for to maximize profit.
Second, designing clothes in actuality takes a lot of money and time. Fabric is, relatively speaking, an incredibly expensive raw material in and of itself, but on top of that is the fact that it’s bulky, produced overseas, and needs to be shipped around the world multiple times—from the mills to the factories to the retail floors. It costs a mind boggling amount of money simply to ship samples of fabric from the mills to the design studios alone. Then add in the fact that every piece of clothing you wear is not sewn together by robots, but by human laborers.
Given the inherent difficulties, I really can’t blame luxury goods makers for the very brilliant and successful legal and sales tactics they employ in order to make a business out of it. It’s really no different from what 37signals has done, except that doing it with a physical product is a lot harder. You write software: there is no physical overhead and everything you create belongs to you. Fashion is very different. Given the lack of legal protections for their products the fashion industry makes for an interesting petri dish for what repercussions we might see if software or other patents were abolished.