Stealing and remixing are two very popular exercises often practiced in today's fashion industry, but, while Miuccia Prada started the trend many years ago in a discreet way and took it to other levels making it often too difficult to spot the source, others simply do not care and seem to be happy when you spot similarities with other designers's collections. Virgil Abloh is among them.
For his first collection as Louis Vuitton menswear Creative Director, Abloh reused for example the plastic chain trick seen in the "Madras" bags by Prada, but changed the colours and the main material of the chains, opting for brighter shades and for porcelain, and applied them to Vuitton classic bags.
There are other references to other designers in this collection (Helmut Lang, Margiela, Raf Simons...) that we will hopefully analyse another time, as this brief post is more about to ponder on something else.
Louis Vuitton's collection featured indeed also jumpers with the four main characters - Dorothy, The Scarecrow, The Cowardly Lion and The Tin Man - from the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland, reduced to four black silhouettes.
The collection also includes jackets and tops with a print of Dorothy sleeping in a brightly coloured poppy field. Now that looks cool, doesn't it? Yet it looks so cool that makes you suspect you may have already seen it somewhere else.
Indeed, the first idea actually seems to be a derivation of a T-shirt sold on Amazon that comes in two versions, with the four characters on the front and with a print of the four characters staring at the Emerald City on the back.
The second case it is even more interesting though: prints and posters of the same image of Dorothy sleeping in the poppy field can indeed be bough on Amazon or Walmart.
Yet you can also buy on Amazon or eBay fabrics with the four characters in a field of poppy and with Dorothy sleeping among the flowers.
Etsy crafters Frockasaurus and LilaJo employed the fabrics for some of their designs that went sold out, so it is obviously a pretty popular eye-catching fabric.
So here's the question for Louis Vuitton and for us as well: are we sure this is luxury fashion? Because, you see, something that is supposed to be filed under the "luxury" category has got be exclusive (which means exclusive prints), original and made with high quality materials.
Now, while the pieces from this collection may be made with the most beautiful materials out there, tweaking fun stuff you can easily find on Amazon or eBay shouldn't be the rule for a powerful fashion house. You see, most luxury houses in the '80s would produce their own exclusive fabrics and sell them by the meter as well (some Italian houses still do so: it may cost between 50 and 70 Euros to buy one meter of D&G or Valentino fabric from a well-stocked textile shop, but you can still do so as we highlighted also in previous posts).
The good news for those who like the inspirations behind the Louis Vuitton collection, is that you can buy cheap Wizard of Oz T-shirts or fabrics online without having to wait for the Vuitton collection to be released.
The bad news if you want to be a designer and bring new ideas and innovation into this industry and you've just invested your money in a very expensive fashion education, is that you got it really really wrong, cos it's the copycats who get the job and the fame in this world and not the ones who work hard to reach perfection.
PS Where did the Dorothy theme come from? Ah, probably from the S/S 13 "Supreme Dorothy" shirts.
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