Apart from being all over the Internet for recently being appointed creative director at Louis Vuitton's menswear line, Virgil Abloh's name also appeared last week in the legal news.
Last week the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York unsealed a lawsuit filed in March that sets Abloh's brand Off-White against 161 sellers on the e-commerce platform Wish.com (OFF-WHITE LLC v. A445995685, et al., 1:18-cv-02099 (SDNY).
According to the lawsuit, the defendants (you can find the complete list here) have been selling fake Off-White products on the platform. The brand claims that the sued sellers sold more than $41 million worth of product on Wish.com, $1.18 million of which coming from fake Off-White products.
Off-White is now seeking $2 million in damages for each infringement; while the litigation takes place, the brand is also asking to remove the sellers from the platform.
It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to investigate the market of fake Off-White products sold on Wish.com (but also on other retailers...): go on Youtube.com and you'll easily stumble upon videos of young bloggers reviewing/comparing original products and Off-White fakes they got from Wish.com. So - yes, surprise surprise - in the same way as there are fake products reproducing designs of famous fashion houses, there are also Off-White counterfeit products out there, after all it is a trendy and hip brand that means money for counterfeiters.
Abloh added a memorandum to the complaint stating that the fakes damaged the "inherent value" of the brand and the relationship between the brand and consumers/retailers. According to him the availability of fakes on the site also damaged Off-White's "ability to attract new customers" and caused Off-White to sustain lost profits.
Now, there is something Abloh may not have realised regarding the ability of gaining new customers: most people buy fake clothes and accessories as they can't afford the original and they still want to have the status that the original gives the wearer or they simply want to avoid investing a lot of money in a sweatshirt that will not be very trendy in 6 months' time.
The worst thing about the immense fake market out there is not the loss it causes to famous brands or the bad quality of its products, but the impact it has on the planet and the unfair treatment of the workers making the garments that are often produced in sweatshops. So there is a human aspect to take into consideration when buying counterfeit products (an aspect we should take into consideration also when buying products from a high street retailer...).
It is somehow surprising, though, to see this lawsuit coming from Off-White, a brand that so far hasn't produced anything extremely original, but collections that show strong links with designs by Raf Simons, Raf Simons at Dior, Prada or Vêtements, and that revolves around the power of the hype and not around innovation.
Abloh's S/S 18 collection for Off-White for example was supposed to be a tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, but featured items that, rather than "inspired", were entirely lifted from the wardrobe of the late Princess (and since they were designer clothes, Abloh should have been sued by various companies/designers, including Escada since he even pilfered the tie and belt by the German brand that Diana wore when she visited St Mary's Hospital in Paddington to see her new-born baby nephew in 1994).
There are actually two surprising things linked with this lawsuit: Off-White may have tried to follow the established procedure to have counterfeit goods removed from Wish.com (as argued by Wish.com's parent company, ContextLogic; this option may have been a better idea as the sellers may have been identified, while sueing them and asking for damages means they will probably disappear or change name as it often happens in these cases). Second, Off-White is owned by Marcelo Burlon, Claudio Antonioli and Davide de Giglio's New Guards Group, but this is the only brand owned by NGG that is filing suit despite the fact that copies of Burlon's County of Milan are also rife all over the Internet.
Besides, if Off-White sues Wise.com why shouldn't bigger companies such as Prada follow in the same steps? Well, probably the latter take the fake for granted as they know that, after reaching a certain stellar fame, you naturally get copied and they don't care anymore, otherwise they would spend their life sueing people, or they simply know that their more exclusive designs make the original easily distinguishable from the fake or almost too difficult to be replicated (while, Off-White's garments are definitely not that difficult to copy...).
Time will tell us who is right or wrong in the Off-White Vs Wise.com case, even though it is unlikely Abloh will ever find the location of all the defendants (mainly operating in overseas locations, these companies tend to disappear or change name very quickly). One defendant - Trendy_World - has actually answered providing sales data in connection with its Wish.com account, and proof of selling a "non-infringing product".
The funniest thing about this lawsuit is that, while the 161 defendants can not sell the allegedly infringing products on the site and will not be able to do so for the duration of the case, more Off-White copies are already available on Wise.com. At the time of writing you can buy on Wise.com a fake Off-White's Mona Lisa/Temperature shirt, or you can buy the original from FarFetch.com.
But you can also opt for another version, a sweatshirt fake, from Aliexpress, the latter has actually reached another stage in the production of knock-offs. As seen in a previous post, retailers on platforms such as Aliexpress often sell small parts such as fake patches so that they avoid being accused of copying an entire designer, while consumers can manufacture their own copies of an original design. You can currently buy from Aliexpress fake Off-White "Shoelaces" and rubber bands to transform your sneakers into the perfect Virgil Abloh X Nike copy.
Off-White's lawsuit follows a previous battle with Paige Denim about the use of the (rather generic) diagonal striped logo and makes you wonder if this is the future of fashion: endless copyright infringement battles revolving around very little originality and very large egos, but with very little consideration for the human tragedies involving the workers and sellers employed and exploited by the counterfeit market (indirectly ridiculed by Off-White's 2016 "if the cops come run" campaign and by the current frenzy about "real fakes"...).
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