He’s one of the hottest fashion designers of the moment — and now Virgil Abloh is coming under fire.
The Off-White founder and artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton found himself in the hot seat after fashion industry watchdog Diet Prada claimed that he may have plagiarized creations from two promising streetwear designers.
The styles in question hailed from Abloh’s Off-White fall ’19 men’s show, with Diet Prada in January taking to Instagram to share a yellow-graffitied suit and a green graphic on a black sweater that bore resemblance to designs by independent brands Colrs and Gramm, respectively.
In the latest issue of the The New Yorker (to be released on March 18), Abloh addresses the criticism, saying he had not seen the Colrs design before creating the garment that went down the runway at Paris Fashion Week in January.
“Ring the alarm!” the designer told the publication. “I could go on for a whole hour about the human condition and the magnet that is negativity. That’s why the world is actually like it is. That’s why good doesn’t prevail — because there’s more negative energy. You can create more connective tissue around the idea that this is plagiarized. It’s better just to sit and point your finger. That’s what social media can be. All that space to comment breeds a tendency to fester, versus actually making something.”
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In a post shared mid-January, Diet Prada wrote, “It could be a coincidence, but Virgil has been known to swipe designs from the fans he meets, some of who happen to be young creatives themselves. Interestingly enough, @punkzec [of Colrs] met Virgil prior to one of his presentations in Paris in 2017. Think they talked design?”
It’s not the first time Abloh has stirred controversy for allegedly plagiarizing designs. Diet Prada took a swipe at the designer last summer for a T-shirt featuring a print that it likened to Italian graphic artist A.G. Fronzoni’s work in 1966. That was only a few months after it made comparisons between Abloh’s Ikea designs and furniture designer Paul McCobb’s contemporary chair.
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