These lines speed up the cycle of fashion. If mallrats can wear pintucked sack dresses the same season they show up first on runways, wealthy consumers wishing to distance themselves aesthetically from said mallrats won't pay high prices for a similar garment. Smaller prestige designers (Featherson would have fallen into this category a few years ago) suffer here—they don't have the name recognition to command prices for either clothes identical to cheaper alternatives or for new directional styles that would seem too risky to buyers with limited budgets. Small scale means high production costs means they can't afford to keep up.

What remains a mystery to me is why the big prestige brands care. People who can afford the Gucci dress aren't going to pick up the ABS version thanks to social pressures and tangible gaps in quality. If anything, the quickened cycle will drive high-end customers to buy more extremely high-quality goods faster to keep their distance from the drooling H&M masses, and the suffering of smaller prestige designers cuts out one more source of competition. DVF should buy Target a drink.

And frumpiness seems to be one of the final means of demonstrating class division through fashion. For a shapeless burlap sack of dress to be at all appealing, the person wearing it needs to have the perfect body, hair, grooming, accessories, etc. Mall shoppers don't have these things, but wealthy women do.

Also interesting in this vein: the aggressively sexual clothing showing up over the last couple seasons, particularly in London. Cristopher Kane dresses work as reverse sack dresses, as only the skinniest frame and most subtly expensive accessories (and, actually, the social circle to recognize the design) can keep a wearer from looking like a hooker.

Okay, that's a really fascinating observation on the economics: the accelerating cycle leads to stratification in the market. Small prestige designers have a choice: Peddle through H&M in order to displace the knock-offs that would just wind up there anyway (am I right?) or seek the capital to produce at costs that will buy safety in the form of luxury aesthetics.

So given this stratifying market, IP protection—whether or not it's desirable in principle—would not even afford protection for those (small prestige designers) who are being forced out of the market, because they categorically lack the resources to engage with or prosecute the people ripping off their styles.

Exactly. The only companies that fashion IP laws could actually help have no chance at being protected by them, but not only because of low-price chains. Designers as well funded and respectable as those backing the new laws have made good money ripping off designs from lesser-known competitors. As Four's iconic circle bag appeared on Helmut Lang runways before Sex and the City featured it and department stores began stocking it, and I'm sure someone with a better knowledge of small designers can produce plenty of similar examples.

In re: frumpy and aggressively sexual designs as class division strategies—how do you think this works? Would you consider this to be a tactic of the designer in order to reach (or create) her ideal audience? Or are these designs selected for their class-confirming effect by the cumulative, maybe even unconscious effort of the buyers, critics, promoters, etc., the industry that sells the product?

Does that make sense? I think you're right that certain styles arrive like bulwarks whenever too many people start participating in fashion (or whichever art genre). I wonder at which stage this happens.

The designers have to be using this as an active strategy. I doubt they design with "what will look hideous on poor people" in mind, but the drive to dress a risk-taking, non-commercial customer nicely suits this purpose, and that's a motivation that designers name explicitly and frequently. I particularly get this sense watching the runways at Marc Jacobs and Prada; one's pressed to find any continuity from season to season at this point, which wasn't the case five years ago (so far as I can see). The constant change-ups throw off copycats looking for a trend to follow and make owning a particular piece rather than a general silhouette more important.