Death, Divorce, & Drama

Fashion brands are often personal endeavors, founded, funded, and run by friends, lovers, and family members.  Creative partnerships are a longstanding source of success in the industry, but the connections between the personal and the professional also give rise to complications, including questions of death and succession, fallout from a divorce or breakup, and daily dramas.  The off-the-runway events that were the talk of the industry during the recent fashion month -- Giorgio Armani's unusual will and the Natalie Massenet / Erik Torstensson split -- are the most prominent recent examples, but these issues eventually affect many fashion designers and companies.  How can the personal and the professional coexist productively?  What makes succession successful?  What are the official and unofficial roles of attorneys when the bosses' boardrooms and the bedrooms are effectively the same space?  What happens when employees, board members, and counsel are caught in interpersonal or intergenerational crossfire?  Will European-style family businesses, American-influenced independent investment, or some other form be the future of fashion?  Join us for a Fashion Law Institute panel discussion of these questions and more, "Death, Divorce, & Drama: Managing the Personal and Professional in Fashion"!