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Cara Delevingne Is Accused Of Ripping Off Feminist T-Shirt Design

LA brand Otherwild aren't happy with Cara's charity T-shirt line

It goes without saying that anything Cara Delevingne wears, we all want to wear too, but there’s been some seriouscontroversy over one of her latest looks and she’s found herself in a bit of hot water with LA design brand Otherwild.

This all started when Cara wore ajumperwith the slogan ‘The Future Is Female’ pasted across the front.Naturally she was hit with pilesof questions from fans about where to get one and as a result, she's decided to team up with the UN Foundation’s Girl Up campaign to sell a bunch of T-shirts with the same logo on.

While that all sounds well and good in theory, the problem is that Otherwild, the brand who have secured the rights to the slogan in the past few years and whose tee Cara was wearing in the original pic, aren’t over the moon about this development.

While Cara’s T-shirts are undoubtedly for a great cause that helpsraise funds for ‘the hardest to reach girls living in places where it’s hardest to be a girl’, Otherwild also licensed the design to help raise funds and donate 25% of proceeds from all sales of their sweatertoPlanned Parenthood.

There’s also a pretty cool story behind why they use this particular design as it was originally the motto of New York’s first women’s bookshop, Labyris Books.

Liza Cowan, who took the original photo of the motto back in 1975, has previosuly expressed concern that while the pic of Cara’s tees have now gone viral off the back of this, they fail to carry the citation of why this is such an important message.

Otherwild, who licensed the design from Liza, have spoken out about just why they are unhappy in a statement, going as far as to call Cara ‘unethical’.

In an email to MTV news Rachel Berks, who owns Otherwild, said the following:

“Otherwild’s redesign and reissue of the FIF tees and buttons is protected under copyright law, which mandates that any reproduction of an existing known public work must be altered at least 20% from the original. If model/actress Cara Delevingne wanted to sell my line, she would need to wholesale them from Otherwild, and because we donate 25% of our line’s proceeds to Planned Parenthood, Delevingne’s ethical practice would benefit not only our woman-owned small business but would also serve as a significant donation to PP.

"Delevingne could also choose not to wholesale from Otherwild and create her own design of the slogan on clothing to sell. But Delevingne’s choice to lift and manufacture Otherwild’s design, claiming it as her own to sell with an undisclosed charitable offering, is indefensible. Her actions ironically counter the very message of the slogan 'The Future Is Female', and it’s confounding that she would do this to a small queer feminist-owned business after purchasing the product from us just a few weeks ago.

"Although under pressure, Delevingne has changed the line’s attribution several times in the past 24 hrs, she has not yet offered to wholesale from us nor cease and desist blatantly copying and selling our designs.”

Bearing in mind both tees are for charity and such positive causes, it’s pretty unfortunate that there’s such controversy surrounds this, so fingers crossed the two parties manage to work things out ASAP.

- ByLindsay Foley.

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