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Someone Call the Fashion Police!



Early in the semester around February I did a blog on plagiarism in the fashion industry and decided that it was one of the projects that caught my eye. I covered fashion 'crimes' around the globe some dealing with the infamous Kim Kardashian and the other dealing with a wedding fashion designer named Sadaf Fawad Khan.  After covering just a few of these copy cats I decided I wanted to do a deeper dive into the world of plagiarism in the world of fashion. Google defines plagiarism as "The practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own." Like I stated in my last blog when we think of plagiarism we normally think of papers, books, etc but don't always associate fashion with the issue.

Recently the Daily Inquirer in the Philippines covered a fashion scandal as an Italian fashion design company called Max Mara is under heavy fire for copying an ethnic minority group. The Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre also known as the TAEC, has recently accused the fashion label of basing their designs off of traditional designs worn by Lao's groups. The TAEC decided to take action by posting photos of multiple designs created by Max Mara that allegedly copied the groups onto their official Facebook page. The specific designs being used by the fashion design label on dresses, top, and skirts are ones the Oma ethnic group wears on their traditional headscarves, jackets, and leg wraps. The statement the TAEC released was "Particularly shocking is that the original embroidered pattern has been copied as print, taken from its original form and essentially duplicated for the collection." They are continuing to post photos and try to raise awareness of the issue and still have received no feedback or response from Max Mara. Three weeks ago they made a final post saying they gave the fashion brand one last chance to respond to the blatant replications of the traditional designs and still had received nothing. A final comment made by the centre was "Sadly, this practice is not uncommon in the commercial arena as designers claim 'inspiration' from traditional designs of ethnic groups around the world."

Fashion designer Christian Siriano an american man that is 33 years old has received backlash from one of the designs worn by a runway model during one of his shows.  A well known fashion police blog named Diet Prada that has over 1.3 million followers on their social media and are even known as a verified account. They posted a photo of a two runway models wearing very similar gowns the first being release in the 2018 spring showing of Valentino's collection and the other being a 'newer' gown created by the brand of Siriano. On top of that there was a second gown from the same collection that Siriano seemed to gain a little too much 'inspiration' from. When the post went viral from Diet Prada Siriano was forced to pull the two Valentino copied looks from his collection. The designer stated that "I wish I could control and make every single dress myself that we put out there, but it's not physically possible." and quickly responded to the post of the fashion blogger by saying he would be pulling the two designs and that designer would never be allowed in his studio ever again.

Finally I decided to dive into the account of Diet Prada that I just discussed up above. They post often covering top fashion brands that seem to get almost all their design inspiration from others and poke fun at these copiers. They cover smaller stories of sunglasses, jewelry, shoes, and more but typically are throwing in major names like Kylie Jenner copying Alexander Wang. Of course Kim Kardashian is always at the center of all things involving fast fashion brands and copying top designers. Conspiracy theories of Kim collaborating with Fashion Nova and then acting as if they rip of her husbands designs swarm the internet weekly. This blog once again is just scraping the surface of this never ending galaxy of fashion look-alikes but taking a deeper dive into this plagiarism has opened my eyes to a whole new world.







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