How our cottage was ‘stolen’... by a fashion house
ONE is a cottage industry on a remote Scottish island, the other a giant of the fashion world.
Married couple Luke and Kate Holt make distinctive planters from their home in Shetland.
But they have been left furious after multi-million-pound fashion house Alexander McQueen used their designs during its spring/summer 2017 show in Paris – without permission.
Cottage-shaped planters the Holts make by hand in Quarff, near Lerwick, inspired images used on rugs adorning the catwalk at the event last October. The design also featured ‘in abstract’ on a coat which was part of the spring/ summer 2018 collection, shown in Paris on June 25 this year.
But despite confessing to this in an email to the Holts, the company has refused to apologise. Mr Holt, 40, whose firm is called Greencroft, said: ‘I was really angry. We don’t have anything to do with Alexander McQueen as a brand and it seems really unfair that they could take one of our products and do that with it.
‘If they had used a photo of a Mercedes, of course they would have paid Mercedes. It’s just because you’re small. They put it out there as if it was an Alexander McQueen design. It’s more an ethical thing. It’s big business versus small business.’
The row started when consultants working for Alexander McQueen visited Shetland last summer for a photo-shoot. While on the island they snapped a picture of one of the planters.
The Holts only found out by chance that the image had been used when a friend saw it in the magazine 60 North, which is published to promote Shetland. Mr Holt added: ‘I certainly wasn’t expecting to see prints of one of our planters in a Paris fashion house, that’s for sure.’
Having contacted Alexander McQueen, the couple eventually got a response from its legal department admitting the image had been used. The fashion giant claimed it was unaware of the image’s origins and felt it had not done anything wrong.
Mr Holt said: ‘You feel like you are battling a giant and you have got no hope with them... they know that we can’t financially do anything.
‘It makes me really sad that I work day in, day out just to make a living and they can basically walk all over what we do. It’s sad.’
Mr Holt, who works as a hospital charge nurse, added: ‘I don’t expect to get any reparations from them now but I do want people to know that it’s happened so that other crafts businesses [and] small designers can be wary.’ Shetland MSP Tavish Scott said: ‘It just seems wrong. There is no question that if it was the other way round and an international designer had their work plagiarised, they would use all the powers at their disposal to demand that the wrong was put right.’
An Alexander McQueen spokesman said: ‘We confirm that an image derived from a Greencroft planter appeared as part of a rug which was the backdrop to a fashion show in 2016.
‘The reverse of the rug, in effect an abstract design, was used for a coat in the men’s spring/summer 2018 show.
‘We have listened to Mr Holt’s concerns. However, we do not agree that this use is an infringement of rights in the planter.’
‘You feel like you’re battling a giant’