Affordable fashion empire Zara accused of stealing designs

The popular affordable fashion brand Zara has just been caught up in a plagiarism scandal and this incident is attracting a lot of attention from netizens.

Accordingly, Tuesday Bassen, a graphic designer in Los Angeles, accused Zara of stealing some of her designs over the past year. These designs are still being sold by Tuesday Bassen on her own website.

Comparison image between 4 designs by Tuesday and Bassen with designs by Zara.

Tuesday Bassen said she was completely unaware that Zara had some designs that looked suspiciously similar to her own until hundreds of fans asked her if she worked for Zara or if they had copied her ideas.

The graphic designer believes Zara has copied four of his cartoonish badge designs and posted a side-by-side comparison. It’s not hard to see that Zara’s designs all have certain similarities, with one even being 99% similar to Tuesday Bassen’s.

Tuesday Bassen asked her lawyer to report the incident to Zara and the famous retailer's response letter made her extremely upset. Accordingly, Zara denied and said that Bassen's accusation was baseless because the number of customers who know Bassen is too small compared to Zara's tens of millions of customers, in other words, there are too few people who know Bassen to recognize that those designs are her signature products.

“I was going to file a motion to dismiss Zara’s claim, but just hiring a lawyer and getting that letter from Zara cost me $2,000. It’s frustrating to have to spend almost all of my money to defend something that is clearly legally mine,” Tuesday Bassen said.

These removable badges for clothing, accessories, etc. are a popular product on Tuesday Bassen's online store.

When BuzzFeed News contacted Zara about the incident, a representative for the company said that Inditex, Zara’s parent company, takes intellectual property issues very seriously. The representative also said that the products in question had been recalled and an investigation had been launched into the more than 600 designers currently working for the company.

According to Phunungaynay