The worst nightmare for any artist is to see his work of art being blatantly copied. And often we see designers taking inspiration or even replicating some other designer's work. The latest one to get into this plagiarism row is Geisha Designs by designer duo Paras Bairoliya and Shalini Jaikaria, who have been accused of copying designer Vaishali S's 2017 creation by the designer herself. Vaishali Shadangule took to social media to call out the brand and wrote, " After several designers softly copied our creations, now it is a bit too much! Geisha Design claims they “created” for Niki Mehra for Cannes! I would rather say created by VAISHALI S for 2017 NY Fashion Week ... exactly THE SAME!!!... and copied in poor quality. Where have creativity and decency gone?"
We spoke to Vaishali Shadangule, who is also the first Indian female designer to showcase at Paris Haute Couture Week and she said that the whole objective to call out the brand for copying on social media is to let other budding design talents know that it is not okay to copy an artist's work. There is no room for plagiarism in creativity. "It is so sad to see all this. There are so many designers who do it and I can't do anything about it. Also it is not just about copying, the designers who have a better marketing technique will take advantage of this. Despite knowing my body of work, copying my design is something very disheartening. I was also thinking if I should waste my energy in posting this on social media, but then if I wouldn't have done it, this would have given other brands the liberty to copy and get away with it easily. I would suggest that designers should focus on their original craft instead," she said.
We reached out to designer duo Paras Bairoliya and Shalini Jaikaria from Geisha Designs and they refused all allegations by calling the design their original creation. "We’ve been in the trade for 22 years now, and never till date have we heard of an allegation of this sort aimed at us. We are Graduates of Design and deliberate and research on our themes extensively before putting together an outfit. We came to know about this through social media this morning; the designer never made any attempts to reach out to us directly. Our outfit is an original creation by our atelier. There is no substance to her claim other than to generate publicity. What we see presently is a monochrome-cropped version of her product. The images of our product is clearly visible (and in full length) on our social media handle (@geishadesigns). She has also in the process of allegation, slandered individuals & brands who have no role in design which we strongly object to. This is out and out a distasteful, mud-slinging approach and hence we have sought legal counsel to plan our next course of action. We would have chosen to stay silent on the subject but having seen the kind of words being exchanged we thought it important to share our perspective," they said.
