Aretha Brown, a 20-year-old Indigenous artist and activist based in Melbourne, has accused fashion label Gorman of ripping off her designs with a new five-piece collection called Night Light.
“So @gormanclothing has stolen some of my designs and made a 5 piece collection out of them,” she wrote on Instagram yesterday (the post has since been deleted). “Thanks big brands for always supporting young Indigenous artists!”
The post has accumulated 6000 likes and nearly 500 comments.
“I got heaps of messages on Instagram from people saying, ‘Congratulations on your collab with Gorman, it’s amazing, we love it,’” Brown tells Broadsheet. “That’s how I found out. I was just gutted. It was disempowering and I was very, very angry.”
She says that some of the newly-released garments have already been discounted heavily. “I think that shows they know they stuffed up and they’re going to get in trouble,” Brown says.
“It’s problematic on so many levels. But mostly it’s that my artwork has taken years to develop. And it’s stories that can’t be retold. Every single star, every single line, every single motif, has meaning to me and my experience as a young Aboriginal teenager. That’s not a story that they’re allowed to retell. More than anything, it’s trying to tell a story which isn’t there.”
“I totally deny Aretha Brown's accusation,” says Lisa Gorman, the label’s founder. “On Monday I reached out to her and invited her in to sight our original artwork. She is yet to reply, however, the invitation still stands.”
Gorman this month won a prestigious Australian Fashion Laureate award for change and innovation, specifically for its Mangkaja collection, produced in collaboration with five Indigenous artists in Fitzroy Crossing, Western Australia. The artists’ work was licensed with help from the Copyright Agency, which said the agreement “set a positive benchmark for future collaborations”.
Gorman has faced, and denied, similar accusations in the past. In 2016 the label denied lifting designs from Sydney fabric designer Eloise Rapp, Melbourne jeweller Emily Green and New York artist Amber Ibarreche. Artist Kirra Jamison also said her work had been copied, a claim rejected by Gorman.
Brown, the daughter of Painters and Dockers singer Paul Stewart and Indigenous artist Donna Brown, exhibited her work at the NGV’s VCE student showcase, Top Arts, in 2019. Her large-scale monochromatic canvases deal with growing up as a queer Indigenous person in the western suburbs, and broader issues such as colonialism and systemic racism.
This story was updated on December 10, with a response from Gorman.
