We’ve all heard the fashion knockoff tales. On one hand, there’s the down-market riffing on designer motifs that ranges from the H&Ms and Forever 21s of the world to counterfeit duds channeled through Chinatown dens. But pilfering exists at all levels of fashion, including at the very pinnacle. And up in the stratosphere, it becomes increasingly difficult to categorize, to draw the line between legitimate inspiration and flat-out derivation.
Not a season goes by when fashion critics don’t home in on references within certain collections. Consider the recent spring 2008 Proenza Schouler effort. Designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez received accolades for their precise rendering of a military motif—trim, brass-buttoned vests, slickly tailored striped jackets and to-die-for feathery numbers seemingly dipped in gold. But the praise was more than tempered by an observation repeated by critic after critic: Too close for comfort to the work of Balenciaga’s Nicolas Ghesquière, noted The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune and Women’s Wear Daily, W’s sister publication.
The Proenza Schouler boys certainly weren’t alone. WWD called Brian Reyes’s leg-baring tunics a “big Prada-esque question mark” and slammed MaxMara for dumbing down Yohji Yamamoto. Style.com noted that Alessandro Dell’Acqua “didn’t touch on anything Prada and Dolce & Gabbana (or even Helmut Lang...) didn’t do 10 or so years ago.” Christopher Kane’s collection, according to the Times, brought to mind “the late Nineties of Daryl Kerrigan.”
Those designers all garnered negative critiques for their apparent cribbing—and justly so, right? After all, as every schoolkid who’s ever sat through a plagiarism lecture can attest, copying is wrong—it’s cheating; it’s taking the easy way out. The issue, then, is what constitutes copying. And in creative disciplines, the line is hardly clear. Even Shakespeare had his sources, and Botticelli didn’t invent Venus. Which is not to equate even the loftiest of fashion designers with either, but rather to acknowledge their parallel reality: In fashion, as in other artistic disciplines, where one takes a reference can be as powerful as where it was found. Certainly in the emotional world of fashion, the topic is fodder for endless debate.
The issue exploded into prominence after Marc Jacobs’s spring 2008 show in New York, one this magazine and WWD loved, the latter noting its references as a creative strength. Some other critics, however, lambasted the designer for those references, citing John Galliano, Chanel and, most of all, Martin Margiela and Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo. “Most disappointing was that Jacobs spent a significant amount of time merely repeating or paraphrasing what [has already been] said aesthetically,” reviewed The Washington Post. “This collection seemed to emerge from the pages of other designers’ old sketchbooks.” But it was Suzy Menkes’s review in the Tribune—“A bad, sad show…an echo chamber of existing ideas,” she wrote—that drew a heated response from Jacobs.
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