In yesterday's post we looked at the curious case of a religious order getting their uniform trademarked. At the end of that post we urged designers to try and protect their work if they think they may have something genuinely unique up their sleeve.
Yet, at the moment, the favourite sport of some of the most famous fashion houses around is not protecting their designs, but stealing - pardon - "getting inspired", from the work of young and unknown creatives.
In June, after seeing images of Gucci's Resort 2018 show in Florence (a collection highly criticised for one design that looked copied from a Dapper Dan creation), two creatives - New Zealand artist Stuart Smythe and Australian self-taught graphic designer and freelance illustrator Milan Chagoury - took to Instagram to claim the company had stolen their logos.
One T-shirt in the collection featured the slogan "Guccify Yourself" and a snake that looked more or less identical to the one created by Smythe for his own company, CLVL Apparel Co, in 2014. In an Instagram post (now removed), the designer highlighted how the scale pattern and the lightning bolts that came out of the mouth of the snake were identical and the snake illustration he did perfectly lined up with the one on the Gucci T-shirt (even a white spot on the letter "R" was recreated for that vintage ink effect). The most hilarious thing about it was that, after whoever copied the design flipped it to change it slightly, the tails of the snake didn't even connect.
In the other case Gucci appeared to have taken Chagoury's logo he designed in 2015 for the White Tiger Tattoo Co. tattoo parlor in Australia and turned its striped tiger into a panther, changing slogans, but retaining the same arrangement of the layout, adding "Guccification", "Soave Amore" and "Loved" in place of "White Tiger Tattoo Co." and "Noosa Heads". The Guccified logo was then applied on a tote bag.
When these incidents were revealed, an official release stated that Alessandro Michele was exploring the duality between faux and real. Yet you wonder why the company never asked the two designers to "Guccify" their logos in a proper collaboration.
Since then it is said that Gucci contacted Smythe and Chagoury offering the chance of a future collaboration and asking them to sign a confidentiality agreement. Both say they turned Gucci down, but Smythe's original post on Instagram has disappeared, something that maybe pointing at the possibly of having reached an agreement.
Before these incidents, though, a young Central Saint Martins womenswear student, Pierre-Louis Auvray, accused Gucci of copying its alien styling for its alien-cast A/W 17 campaign. In this case Alessandro Michele went on to explain the videos were filmed months before Auvray's posts of his images on Instagram. So, while in the previous cases the similarities were rather puzzling, in this case it may have been a strange coincidence.
Yet things aren't over: Parsons' Chinese-born student Terrence Zhou took to Instagram a few days ago like all the other young creatives before him, claiming this time that Viktor & Rolf borrowed inspiration for their A/W 17 Haute Couture collection from his portfolio.
In an interview with Women's Wear Daily (WWD), the young designer explained how he had applied for an internship with Viktor & Rolf in late May, sending them his digital portfolio. His application was rejected since the company requires interns to have an EU passport.
While a U.S. spokeswoman for Viktor & Rolf dismissed Zhou's claim on Monday pointing out that dolls have been a theme of V&R's collections, when you compare the pictures, you get the impression that V&R's collection was a more refined version of Zhou's "Plastic Surgery" collection made in collaboration with fashion illustrator Lizzi Shin as a school project at the end of the Autumn/Winter 2016 semester at Parsons (Shin made the heads that went with Zhou's designs).
The most surprising thing about all these stories is not the fact that luxury companies are employing the same modus operandi of High Street retailers for their designs, but the fact that Zhou spoke to his lecturers at Central Saint Martins who more or less told him that this is the fashion industry and things can't be reversed.
Zhou also told WWD that he had friends at CSM "who have had big companies copy their designs and made a lot of money without giving them any credit. Some companies paid them to shut them up and some companies declined to comment."
These stories may prove students need more protection: sending your portfolio to a company hoping to get (not even a proper job but) an (unpaid) internship or putting your collections online only to be copied, hurts a lot on the psychological and the financial level.
Yes, students don't have the money to sue a big company, and their position makes them weak preys of powerful and wealthy fashion houses, so encouraging them to face such rivals is not wise. At the same time, maybe it is about time that universities also helped them with more intensive classes on copyright law and trademarks rather than making them believe that, since everybody is stealing and nothing can be changed, well, they have to conform and accept things as they are (it wouldn't also hurt if the fashion media would stop hailing as geniuses the creative minds behind some famous fashion houses that in the last few years engaged themselves in a stealing and revomiting exercise).
Social media and Instagram in particular seem to have helped quite a few designers and creative minds highlighting copyright issues, but young students should be offered the chance to get to know more about their rights and the actual risks they run when they share their work with big and powerful houses. As things stand, religious orders seem to be knowing better than young creatives how to deal with Intellectual Property laws and, if something doesn't change (also at university level) rather than their lecturers' useless advice, young graduates will be needing a Patron Saint of the Uncopyrighted Student Collection/Portfolio.
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