3 Other Patches Were Made for Harper's Bazaar Jean Jacket Decorating Party Without Artists' Permission 

Last week, Jezebel reported on a jean jacket decorating party hosted by Harper’s Bazaar, where celebrities like Olivia Wilde and Aurelie Bidermann affixed patches to jean jackets in celebration of generally empowering female camaraderie.

But, the patches used for that party have an unsavory provenance. Jezebel reported on one of the available designs, an image made by Leste Magazine’s Sara Sutterlin reading, “WHEN WOMEN SPEAK IT IS MOSTLY POETRY,” that was turned into a patch without credit or compensation until Sutterlin launched a dogged social media campaign for retroactive payment. It turns out that the saga of the Patch Party goes much deeper than we thought: at least three other patches were manufactured without Harper’s Bazaar notifying or paying their original artists. These wealthy women are wearing jackets festooned with stolen work.

Emma McIlroy, CEO of Wildfang, a fashion brand for “badass women,” told Jezebel that Harper’s Bazaar reached out to her about placing an order for several pins for that same jean jacket decorating party back in October, and they eventually ordered 75 copies of two different pins—one depicting a manicured hand lifting a weight, one depicting a fist, and another reading, “Yas Kween.” But McIlroy was alarmed to see, in a photograph of the patch selection that night, their WILD FEMINIST design had been turned into a patch (the black square at the bottom left corner of the image above)—especially since she had explicitly offered that design in pin form to Harper’s Bazaar during their initial interaction.

In an email provided to Jezebel dated October 14, 2016, McIlroy explicitly offers to sell Harper’s Bazaar the WILD FEMINIST pin (which was not available online at the time) at a discount and attaches a photograph of it in her email to the magazine.

Hi Vilma

So lovely to hear from you. I can absolutely help. We can offer you 20% discount on anything you need and I’ll cover expedited shipping fees. If you want to buy any of the pins below i can offer a bigger discount (30%), because we make them and they have a bigger margin:

http://www.wildfang.com/the-we-are-all-pins.html

We also have a new FEMINIST pin (attached is artwork, looks much better in person) which I could sell you (30% discount) — it’s not online yet but in a week or so.

So – just let me know:

– what quantities of each pin you want

– when it needs to arrive

Also if you wanted to buy our famous WILD FEMINIST tee i’d be happy to offer that at 40% discount, because we want as many people wearing them as possible!! Just depends on how many and how soon you need them.

Would love to help!!
Thanks

Ems

After a bit of back-and-forth, the Harper’s Bazaar representative, Marketing Associate Vilma Diaz responds on October 17, 2016 with the following email, with no mention of the WILD FEMINIST pin.

Hi Em,

We’ll proceed with the order below:

70 YAS KWEEN
50 Women Who Lift
25 Feminist Fist

Could you please send through the confirmed total for this order?

Thank you!

But, in a photograph of the event posted initially by the New York Observer and further circulated by Get Artists Paid, you can clearly see the WILD FEMINIST pin design made into a patch.

“That’s super interesting, because we never made a patch,” McIlroy told Jezebel on a phone call on Friday. “Even though the artwork is identical to ours, and the artwork is identical to the artwork that I attached in the email to Harper’s Bazaar offering them our pin, I know that we didn’t produce this because we never made a patch.”

McIlroy told Jezebel that she reached out to a representative asking for an explanation, hopeful that she could explain to her numerous Instagram followers who had noticed the patch what had happened. “There must be something I’m missing here,” she said. She soon received the following email, a copy of which was also provided to Jezebel:

Hi Emma,

We have gone through our files and discovered that the artwork was created inadvertently by an intern.

Please accept our apologies for recreating the referenced artwork without proper credit. This was an unfortunate oversight on our part and by no means done intentionally. We are quite stringent with protecting the rights of artists’ work in all forms when reproduced by the publication and would like to offer payment for the usage.

Thank you,

Vilma

“I went back and I said, look, I’m not interested in being paid for this,” McIlroy told Jezebel. “This was not our agreement. Our agreement was to help you guys out and offer a discount, which we did, and our agreement was never to license you our most famous mark. All I want from you guys is an apology, all I want is a public apology on social media because our concern is that, as with any kind of trademark or copyright infringement, confusion now exists in the marketplace, and there is confusion as to who owns that mark and who created it.”