I Heart Modcloth: An Investigation

Sometime in the spring of 2007 I happened upon a lovely little online clothing store called ModCloth. They sell funky vintage clothes and cute clothes by young independent designers. I've gotten a lot of my favorite pieces there, the ones I go to when I have to look great. In fact, I just picked out a dress to wear to my boyfriend's brother's wedding. I've been looking for one for weeks. (No, I'm not going to tell you which dress. I don't have the funds at the moment and don't want you, my imaginary readers, to buy them out before I save up.) One of the best things is that if you buy it on ModCloth you're unlikely to see anyone else wearing it.

Unless you buy this dress:



I tried this dress on in Urban Outfitters a couple months ago when I was looking for a dress to wear to The Phantom of the Opera. It was adorable, but the straps needed to be shortened and I thought it was just too young and cutesy for a night out. It wasn't what I needed at the time, but I've secretly been coveting it for awhile. It's near the top of my Things to Buy When I Get a Job list.

And then the other day I headed over to ModCloth and saw it priced almost twenty dollars below Urban. And I got really happy and came over here to write a post entitled "An Ode to ModCloth." But when I went over to Urban to double check their price, I noticed something interesting.

It's not the same dress.








This is the dress Urban Outfitters is selling:


It's very similar. Weirdly similar. Like, beyond coincidence. In fact, I spent awhile clicking back and forth between two browser windows to make sure it wasn't a trick of the lighting. (Yes, I still use IE6, what of it?) But the straps are clearly not the same. And the bodice of the Urban dress is more of a royal purple than ModCloth's violet. And if you look at the back, the bows appear to be different colors as well.

Urban Outfitters seems to have a long history of plagiarizing young designers' work, so I set out to investigate. It was long and arduous and mostly consisted of emailing Alicia at ModCloth and asking her annoying questions about who designed the dress and how I could contact them and what the style number of the dress is. She was lovely and gracious enough to promptly respond to all of my inquiries. The dress is by Staccato, and they say that although they do sometimes sell to Urban UK, this dress was only sold to boutiques and specialty stores. I was unable to contact Urban Outfitters.

I don't want to accuse Urban Outfitters of stealing the design outright, but they're practically identical. The color changes are the equivalent of the accent and chewed fingernails distinguishing Susan from Sharon in The Parent Trap. This goes beyond the "on the wind" situation in which two comedians tell similar jokes about a current event or two designers make similar pleated skirts in the hot color of the season. These dresses are distinctive and someone spent a long time making sure the cut and colors and proportions were just right, and someone else spent a few minutes copying it. That's a shame.

Whatever happened, check out ModCloth. It's full of sassy clothes that will make you look super stylish, and they don't plagiarize.