Alessandro Michele Responds To Plagiarism Accusations

Alessandro Michele has responded to claims that Gucci has plagiarised a Central Saint Martins student. The creative director of the brand explained that the accusations have saddened him and denies replicating or even seeing the student's work.

The accusations were made by CSM student Pierre-Louis Auvray last week, who claims that Gucci's alien video series is a "blatant rip-off" of his designs.

"I am just a student working hard on building my own stuff and the last thing we need as young creatives is to be ripped off," he wrote on his own Instagram account, before the below was posted on an account run by CSM students.

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Michele, however has denied that he ever saw Auvray's work before these accusations were made and explained that the similarity is purely a coincidence.

"It's not true," he told The Business of Fashion. "It's something that makes me feel really sad. People build a story around nothing."

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The designer went on to explain that the idea was formed many months ago, as is required with such large campaigns for the house, therefore he could not have seen Auvray's work, which was posted just seven weeks ago.

"It's about memories, so movies from the Seventies, including Star Trek: Lost in Space, that I saw many times," the designer said. "It's more about space, we have the robots, we have the aliens."

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Auvray has since responded to this in a statement to the site, where he said: "This is an aesthetic that I have heavily featured on my social media for a very long time ... I intended to keep working on and make it a part of my graduate collection portfolio, [but] I will no longer be able to do it because I am just a student and Gucci has an international platform ... Fashion has some really ugly sides and what happened to me is very sad but I am conscious that some companies [have done] even worse things to plenty of other young artists. But it doesn't mean it should be normalised. Instagram and social media are great promotion tools for us, I just wish these companies would not use them to steal our ideas."

From: Harper's BAZAAR UK