On September 30, the Loewe parade at Paris Fashion Week was surprising mainly because of the anthurium flowers that made up some of the pieces in the new collection of the Spanish fashion house, but also because of the supposed originality of the Proposals designed with pixels: sweaters, pants and T-shirts walked down the catwalk, giving the illusion of being “pixelated”. Now, it is known that these designs may have been inspired by those of the Portuguese brand Maison Pixel.
“The end result is the same as ours from the creative point of view, even if the execution is not,” Sebastião Teixeira, creative director and CEO of the company, begins by telling the Observer. “Without a desire to copy, the media space for this vision, which we have been cultivating for a long time, was stolen from us and is being handed over to Loewe alone as the creator of everything, when we spent years trying to get to some of these points of sale unsuccessful fashion.”
This Wednesday, October 5, Maison Pixel used its Instagram account to warn about the clear similarities between its garments and those presented by Loewe. The objective, they say, is to denounce the message transmitted by the media. “It received ‘crazy’ media coverage, critics and audiences praised it [às peças da Loewe] for originality, innovation and as a turning point in fashion”, wrote the Portuguese.
“It is extremely frustrating that all the hard work of the last 7 years is taken away from us like this, no credit to the initial creators.“, continues the publication. “It clarifies the difference between a big brand that does a superficial job in something and has all the protagonism around it, and the small ones that don’t have that importance,” adds Observer Sebastião Teixeira.
Maison Pixel, which sells in Portugal through its online store, focuses mainly on the sale of underwear and swimsuits. It has registered patents on the design of underwear and Copyright of all its pieces, in addition to the fact that the brand itself is also registered with a patent. “We saved ourselves to have a legal framework around what we were doing,” reveals the creator.
The project started with a fundraising in 2014 and the pieces in the questão foram launched in 2015. Second or responsável, or chuva jacket and the shoes that can be seen in the images of the post fizeram part of a collection-capsule that was present at fairs and online, but not yet right now.
The production is carried out entirely in Portugal and 99 percent is exported. — are already in more than 40 countries. The largest market, reveals Sebastião, is the United States of America, followed by Europe. He launched the brand together with his partner, Cesária Martins, who is also a creator. They were both designers and working together at an advertising agency when they came up with this idea. They did a crowdfunding that “went very well and exploded in the United States.” “And so we felt the need to explore the theme and be a brand,” she recalls.
Sebastião explains that this alert is also a “look” at the difficulty of “breaking into the world of fashion” for small projects, in contrast to the emphasis given to big brands: “10 years ago, when we started this , we already knew from the presence of gaming and two social networks that this was a natural step in the design. It makes us sad because we already had this exploratory space, which is now being swept away”.
However, the brand message also tries to show the ease with which ideas are attributed to a creator without confirming that they did not exist before. “[Como é que] in a world as digitized as ours, where it is easy to see if there are already other things like this, does anyone ever associate these points? (…) If we don’t make this noise now, we run the risk of being completely unknown or, ironically, in time, saying that we are the ones who are copying the work of a big brand.”
At the moment, they are contacting Loewe to see if they can collaborate, without assuming, for the moment, that there has indeed been plagiarism. “We are not going to use our patents as leverage to coerce or anything like that. We just want to let you know that we have registered things, it will be something in a collaborative sense”, concludes the spokesperson.
The Observer has tried to contact Loewe, but has yet to receive a response.
Source: Observadora
