Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2011. It is a news item, and the events it describes were current then; ‘yesterday’ refers to the original publication date.
Yesterday, news spread of plagiarism by Inditex: the company was accused of taking photos of fashion bloggers with a strong reputation in the fashion world and putting them on the group’s T-shirts. The first blogger to protest was the French author of Le Blog de Betty, who bears a striking resemblance to the design printed on the T-shirt.
Within a few hours, social media had made it go viral, with posts such as “Zara the plagiarist“, a “lack of inspiration at Inditex” and all kinds of stories criticizing the misconduct of the designers at Amancio Ortega‘s company.
Things must have got pretty bad for Inditex, because in a statement given to La Voz de Galicia, the company confirmed that it had bought those shirts from a supplier outside the company. Even so, to clear up any doubts, it has withdrawn all the garments accused of plagiarism and will contact the bloggers affected to apologize.
It’s not clear what effect Inditex was going for when it put T-shirts with images of these bloggers in its stores. Some of them get more than 40,000 unique visitors on their blogs in a single day and are fashion trendsetters.
What is clear is that in this particular business, and in this case, Inditex’s shot backfired (pun very much intended), because these women were not at all amused to see their photos on T-shirts.
Featured image: Zarateman, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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