Luxury Law Summit New York Chair Barbara Kolsun was honoured last month for her 10 years of service as the director of Cardozo School of Law’s Fame Center and professor of practice.
Under her direction, FAME provides training and development opportunities to law students so they can represent businesses driven by the creative process.
“FAME is the culmination of my life’s work,” Barbara told us. “Having worked in the fashion world for so many years, I saw in real time how fashion is not a standalone business. All this incredible creativity was out there – music, art, design, film – but no one was teaching it in a legal and business context. That’s why I founded FAME.”
A trailblazer in fashion law, she built her career at the intersection of the industry and academia, serving as general counsel to iconic global brands including Kate Spade, Seven for All Mankind and Stuart Weitzmann before shaping the next generation of lawyers as FAME’s professor of practice. She quite literally wrote the book on fashion law – The Business and Law of Fashion and Retail – and has mentored generations of students and young lawyers who have gone on to build successful careers across the fashion and creative industries.
We asked Barbara to talk with us about the FAME programme and her contributions to it and the luxury industry.
Barbara, why did you start the FAME programme?
FAME was the perfect way to combine law, business and the creative arts. Many of the courses were already offered at Cardozo, but they weren’t under a single creative roof. When the Dean and I looked at our alumni, we saw that so many of them were successful in creative fields like fashion, art, sports and entertainment.
You worked in fashion for many years. How did it inform what you wanted to do with the FAME programme?
Yes, I worked as a legal counsel in the fashion industry for 35 years. I saw in real time how fashion is not a standalone business. Just look: there’s Tom Ford directing films, Alicia Keys with a beauty line, Farrell Williams designs for LVMH, Zac Posen designs for GAP, Kate Spade designed uniforms for the airlines and so on. It was important to me to bring this sort of integration together in a programme for lawyers.
Are lawyers creative people?
Of course they are. I was a singer and an actor and like many people in creative fields, I went to law school as a way to make a living. When I started as a student at Cardoza in 1979, there were many creatives in my class including a ballerina and a violinist. Our FAME programme fosters the innate creativity in lawyers and lets them then bring it to the business world.
[After graduating from Cardozo, Barbara became the first alumna to clerk for the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as a pro se law clerk, marking another early milestone in her trailblazing career.]
Why did you bring this programme to Cardozo School of Law?
Well, this programme lends itself to New York. New York has everything that’s needed to make this programme a success – art, fashion, music, sports. We also have some of the most successful creatives in the legal industry as alumni, including dozens of Cardozo alumni who work as lawyers in places such as Warner Music, Sony Music, YouTube, sports leagues, Sotheby’s, as well as Chanel, Ralph Lauren and the list goes on.
What’s something people don’t know about why you started the FAME programme?
Creative people always have a second act and a third act and more. This is mine.
The Global Legal Post interviewed Barbara on industry trends, her career and luxury law advice in a previous Q&A interview.
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