The Independent has a quick little write-up on the moral and ethical grey areas of the most common thing in fashion: rampant copying. We're used to the H&Ms and Zaras of the world taking designs straight off the runway of high-end brands and distilling them down for the masses through extremely similar patterns and borderline exact replicas except for, like, one minor detail. It seems to have come with the territory of the modern fashion landscape. As they say, "Good artists copy, great artists steal."
But some designers don't seem to mind it. Shit, it even happens within higher-end circles now thanks to modern designers drawing inspiration from past collections by other brands. The primary reason this topic is being discussed right now is that Jeremy Scott and Moschino are facing a lawsuit from graffiti artist Joseph Tierney, who claims that Scott used artwork of his from 2012 for Katy Perry's outfit at the Met Gala earlier this year.
You can see where Tierney is coming from. Small artists have been victimized again and again by big brands with deep pockets who are able to fight off the cases in court. Sure, that's an age-old storyline within many businesses, but the fashion world is one of the few places where copying is most obvious, yet difficult to prove. Designers rarely opt for patents on designs for clothing because they're time-consuming and impossible to hold up, which spawns a wave of easy rip-offs without much consequence and has led to an almost unspoken understanding that if you make a great piece, other designers are absolutely going to replicate it in their own way. In the art world, it can be just as difficult to prove anything, which is why it will be quite interesting to see where this Moschino lawsuit actually goes and if an artist can successfully defend what he feels like was his work being exploited without his consent.
