On Saturday I was just pulling up to a baby shower with majority art/craft attendees when I got a pix message on my phone from one of my former students, the talented Chicago designer Cory Allen (Linsmeyer.) He was at Urban Outfitters and saw a particular scarf that reminded him, and me, of something I'd "invented" a few years ago, that he himself modeled for the post. You can see it on knitty, I sold the pattern. Last time I looked on Ravelry 128 people had used the pattern to make their own, with some unbelievably cool/funny innovations. I love the idea of people using the pattern to make their own. What I didn't love was the idea that Urban Outfitters was selling versions made in the third world that look a lot like mine.
And this was the second time I'd felt UO was ripping one of my ideas off. The first, in the early 2000's they started selling a cross-stitch kit with a particular word on it - a word that, when I stitched it on a heart-shaped doily, prompted a more gentle citizen to demand that my work be immediately removed from a Seattle Art Museum exhibit, on grounds that it was insulting to embroiderers, and obscene besides. I made the thing in 1998, it was at SAM in 2001. I bear no ill will towards the person who is selling these kits to UO, because at least, it's a person and she gets credit! Plus she's also developed the idea far past the point I did. (Swordsmith /artist Phillip Baldwin owns my original work, we traded for a cast-iron sink.)
Back to me in my car getting this pix message: I immediately begin venting as soon as I get into the baby shower. It was the perfect setting for commiseration. And for gathering information. Jenna, talented designer and Etsy seller informed me that there was a seller called Yokoo who made chain scarves that looked like mine too. (On closer inspection, Yokoo's are crochet, and FABULOUS. Buy from him if you need a readymade item, because they're vastly superior to anything you'll find a UO.)
But here's the thing: if you go to knitty and look at my pattern, you'll see that it's been up since 2005, and that I openly credit two other designers, Teva Durham and Marc Jacobs for inspiring me. Then, if we were to open my email in-box you'd find a lot of email from people who have made the scarves, and innovated on my original idea. What makes mine different is that it's felted after it's knitted. The Urban Outfitters chain looks a lot more like Teva Durham's from Loop d Loop. Who's ripping off whom, here? And what's the time limit on a knitted chain going into public domain?
But just beware all you young hipsters: they're stealing your cool and selling it back to you. Even cool that might have at one time been generated by an old academic thread-head such as myself. No one seems safe!
I'm reminded of an unpleasant experience one of my other talented former students, Michael Cepress, had the week he was due to start graduate school at the University of Washington (that MFA program in Textiles is now defunct, sadly.) He and his brother were at Bulldog News, near the campus in Seattle, and he chanced to see the cover of FiberArts magazine...with "his work" on it. Meanwhile, back in Green Bay, I got my copy in the mail and felt deep nausea myself; it was a pair of nearly transparent silk organza jeans, which appeared identical to the pair Mike had stitched up for his senior show for undergraduate school. But these were by someone else, a woman, who wasn't talking about the same issues as Mike was at all, and they were made far away, and nearly simultaneously. There was no real issue of one copying the other, but, there was in that brief moment the horror of knowing for sure that your "original" idea could at any moment turn out to be the same as someone else's.
So, there lies the rub: you can't always be sure if you've been ripped off, or if you're just one of many who felt the universe pulse in a particular direction at a particular time. Best advice: just keep your own work authentic to who you are, be careful where you spend your money, and make rather than shop.
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