Fashion Law: Zara is Plagiarizing again and this Time its Different
As if infringing upon luxury designers isn’t enough, Zara is once again under fire for allegedly plagiarizing another creators work. The Spain-based fast fashion company has been selling garments replicating luxury designers for decades but this time around the internet is going mad about its latest copy infringement on Indie artist and illustrator, Tuesday Bassen.
Bassen, a Los Angeles based artist who has worked with the likes of Nike, Playboy, Adidas, and the New Yorker is currently suing the retail giant for creating replicated copies of her patchwork designs. The artist first received wind of the plagiarism when numerous fans of her work reached out to her directly inquiring about the designs appearing in Zara’s e-commerce platform earlier this year. Bassen stay hushed about the plagiarism and did not confront the Spanish label until she was given a letter from Zara’s lawyers. The letter claimed her work as “too simple” to defend against any sort of copy infringement. She even had to pay $2K just to retain this letter from Zara’s attorneys. Infuriated by the ill-mannered message towards her work, Bassen took it to social media to showcase her outrage. She posted the following snippet from the letter to showcase Zara’s unjust claim.
“I want to point out that most artists don’t even get this far. The ‘luxury’ of spending $2k for a lawyer to write a letter is something most artists cannot afford,” Bassen stated on Twitter. “This is for me and this is for every single artist that can’t do anything.”
Zara is estimated to have plagiarized over 40 independent artist’s intellectual properties across the globe. Such artists include Georgia Perry, Adam J Kurtz, Pity Party Coporation, and Mokuyobi Threads. View below for other allegedly scorned artists who have acquired Zara’s piracy. New York based artist, Adam J Kurtz has since started a online site petition highlighting designs that have been manipulated and stolen from Zara. View the site here: www.shoparttheft.com.
While Zara has been infamous for stealing looks from the likes of Givenchy, Chloe, Alexander Wang, Moschino, Kanye West in the past – notably larger scaled brands do not feel the wrath from a fast retail giant as opposed to smaller labels. Independent designers who cannot match the retail giant’s pricing and mass production, the consequences of dilution and consumer confusion weighs immensely heavier.
Will this be enough to strike legal proceedings against the notorious multinational company Inditex? At the height of having over 90 million fans, will justice be served to the smaller artist community?
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