According to a recent lawsuit filed by April Walker, fellow designer Virgil Abloh assertedly stole some of her work and she’s preparing for war.
April Walker’s lawsuit, which was filed in August, claims that Abloh and his firm Off-White willfully used Walker’s hallmark WW XXL Athletic logo on a jacket dubbed the “Diagonal Stripe Varsity Bomber Jacket,” which was reportedly sold at Saks Fifth Avenue for $2,234.
April explains her thoughts
Walker was obviously upset by the news that she’d been poached, and she wrote an essay for Fashion Bomb Daily condemning Abloh for the “intellectual theft.” April Walker revealed how that moment of understanding felt in a new interview with HipHopDX.
“When it was brought to my attention, I was actually disappointed and shocked,” April said. “That was it. And it just took a moment to sink in, because now I was aware of it. It happens way too often with creatives and Black and brown creatives. It just hit home, and it was a moment of pause and reflection of just trying to understand.
“You really start processing it and trying to think, ‘Am I bugging out?’ And then when everybody is hitting you and saying, ‘Congratulations’ and, ‘Can I get that jacket?’ — that kind of thing, you realize no. So yeah, that was it. After I came down off of being in shock and disappointment, I wrote about it,” April ended
The moment she noticed
The paragraphs read, “As we walked into Women’s History Month, I noticed in an Instagram ad that Off-White introduced a WW Letterman jacket that felt too close for comfort in the design. It was a classic design that we’ve been using for years.
“As these DM’s started rolling in, and the phone started ringing, there were many confused tribe members trying to figure out what was going on, was it a collab, some were infuriated and felt that the design was disrespectful to say the least.”
According to April, Off-White “appears to have an unfortunate and long history of taking others’ designs. Virgil Abloh himself has made public statements acknowledging that he relies very substantially on others’ designs as part of his design strategy.”
“This is about Black and brown creatives and women, because I feel like we have to fight even more than women just in general,” April explains. “We’re at the bottom of the barrel. So it’s just all of that. And I’m just tired. We’re a target, and I’m really tired of that. You have to take a stand and you have to protect your name and your brand. You have to be fearless. You can’t move forward with fear. You just do the best you can. You use your voice and you stand up for what you believe is right.
“And I’ve really built a legacy, and I have value and my brand has value. And besides representing fashion, we represent culture. So I’m really standing up against all of that. Don’t come for me because you have no right to do that. We trailblazed this way.”
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