Wardrobe-Gate: It's Not Just For the Lower 48 Any More

I feel a bit like the heroine in ''Legally Blonde,'' but with different hair color, and of course dialing back on all that fuchsia:

Thanks to my knowledge of shopping, I busted this case wide open!

Over the weekend, Governor Sarah Palin was backing away from Wardrobe-Gate like, well, like an Alaskan moose backing away from the barrel of a 30-06 Winchester.

She was back to wearing her own clothes, Palin said pointedly. And she had bought a lot of them from her favorite store, a resale shop in Anchorage called ''Out of the Closet.''

That name ... it rings a bell in Southern California ears, doesn't it? ``Out of the Closet'' is a chain of nonprofit thrift stores operated by and for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Liz Taylor has donated stuff to it. So have Carol Burnett and Aaron Spelling and the makers of ``The X Files'' and ``Buffy the Vampire Slayer.''

I raised questions about this in my weekend blog here and on the LA Times site. Why? Because the OOTC shop in Anchorage, beloved of Palin, makes no mention whatsoever of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation on its website. OOTC's AIDS charity status is a huge selling point for the California stores. So I posed the question, ``Trademark lawyer alert?''

Question answered. At a press conference today, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation did two things.

One, it invited Palin to donate that notorious $150,000 makeover wardrobe to the nonprofit ``Out of the Closet.'' After news of the Saks-Neiman's-Bloomingdale's dress-the-candidate shopping spree got out, the campaign tried to recover the PR high ground and said the clothes were always destined for the charity pile anyway.

It didn't specify which charity might get them, but now the AIDS Healthcare Foundation has stepped up and offered to take the whole Valentino-Tahari-Kate Spade-Cole Haan embarrassment off the Republicans' hands.

And two, the foundation's lawyers are pressing the trademark infringement issue against the Anchorage OOTC, sending off a ''cease and desist'' letter about the name that's been above the doors of the foundation's AIDS benefit shops since 1990.

``Out of the Closet'' is a federal trademark, and yes, that means Alaska, too. As Palin herself noted rather indignantly in a Katie Couric interview, ``Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, `Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C. may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?' ''

Exactly, governor. Alaska should have no problem keeping in touch with what Washington, D.C. is thinking and doing -- and that includes the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Comments

[JoeSausage]

I'm glad to see that it's a case copyright infringement! For a minute there I thought that the bible-thumping hate merchant was actually supporting an AIDS charity. Silly me!

[KahneO]

and this thing gets messier. Thanks, Sarah.

[mommadona]

I say, Well done......

Onward!