I stumbled upon this article in the Guardian yesterday and I feel a need to both comment on it and, most of all, hear what you girls think about it.
Short version: a designer from Zara was surfing the blogs, came upon a photo of a blogger in an outfit they liked I guess, made an illustration of it and applied it on a T-shirt for Zara. Just like that! Now, it turns out that although it is disrespectful to the blogger to even think of doing that, there is another side to the story; apparently there are hundreds of designers working for Zara who are required to make a certain number of designs every day to support their hyper production of 40 000 designs a year.
I know all you guys know how brutal this is: just imagine how many days you had when you just didn't have it in you. Or were just uninspired. Imagine that in spite of this, you had to do, not just work, but a lot of work.
Other thing that bothers me here, is illustration. I know someone was probably uninspired and maybe just fed up, but it is not an illustration if you just redraw a photo. This issue really gets to me. Change the length of her hair, colour of the t-shirt, anything, just don't only trace the photo and call it illustration! Copycats always angered me. One time I saw an illustrators portfolio online (apparently they were published by Elle and some similar magazines) who had in their portfolio 100% copied Davind Downton's illustration. Not style, but the pose, colour, lines, everything. Putting aside that they have a career in this, but aren't they ashamed!?! And did they think no one will notice, cause we are talking about a famous art here.
I'd like to hear, what are experiences of you guys who focus on writing. Do you ever encounter this in same or similar form? Or have you ever seen someone shamelessly copy someone else's (or even your) outfit?
p.s. Little treat in the illustration, I dressed the girls in Marc Jacobs Fall 2011 collection outfits!
