Johanna Ulevich was surprised to log on to a Reddit message board for crafting and see people making fun of a hat made of a mishmash of colorful yarns of varying textures. The hat, sold by retail chain Urban Outfitters, bore an uncanny resemblance to her own work — a line she called “YARNMAGEDDON.”
“Someone posted the hat saying it was ugly,” says Ulevich (who, full disclosure, is a friend of this reporter). “And I was like, HOLD UP THAT’S YARNMAGEDDON!”
She adds, “Obviously, [I was] not offended [because] the point of YARNMAGEDDON is to be ugly.”
What offended her, she says, was how similar the product was to her creations.
Ulevich created her YARNMAGEDDON line in 2021, which included a show at the Eat Da Rich gallery in Detroit. “I don’t have many followers but when I was working on YARNMAGEDDON in 2021 I boosted the posts constantly and received interactions from many people in the industry,” Ulevich wrote in an Instagram post putting Urban Outfitters on blast. “I’m disappointed to see a mass-produced version of a line I worked so hard on.”
Urban Outfitters is selling two items that bear a striking similarity to Ulevich’s designs: a “Mixed Yarn Bucket Hat” for $45, and a “Mixed Knit Scarf” for $59.
Ulevich acknowledges that her original line did not include a bucket hat or scarf, and that Urban Outfitters’ designs are crocheted and not knitted, as hers are.
“The point is that the style I created is unique to the point that even rendered in crochet instead of knitting it still looks like my signature,” Ulevich says.
In response to a query from Metro Times, a representative from Urban Outfitters replied, “I appreciate you bringing this to our attention. I’ll pass on your feedback to our team, so they can look into this further.”
This is not the first time Urban Outfitters has been accused of stealing a design. In 2017, California’s Ninth Circuit Court concluded that Urban Outfitters was liable in a copyright infringement case, upholding a decision ordering the company to pay $530,000 for what a panel of judges described as “reckless disregard” of the copyright of a small Los Angeles manufacturer.
Ulevich says her YARNMAGEDDON line was inspired by her own sensibilities and guided by the materials that were available to her in Detroit.
“I wanted to knit something that reflected my manic mind — lots of colors, textures, all going in different directions,” she says, adding that she used reclaimed yarn from the nonprofit Arts & Scraps to keep costs low and make her project sustainable. “YARNMAGEDDON was essentially a knitting manic episode,” she adds. “The bright colors also were meant to cheer me up as we went into another COVID winter.”
She says that in 20 years of knitting, she has never seen anyone do what she had done. “I’d seen people occasionally knit in different directions, or combine fibers, but always in a way that was planned and symmetrical,” she says. “I wanted to throw out all the rules and just knit in one direction til I got bored, then start in another direction with different yarn and different stitches.”
As a struggling artist, Ulevich says the incident makes her feel “furious ... but I guess yes, also a bit flattered.”
She adds, “I guess that’s how you know you have good ideas these days, even if you never ‘make it’: a major corporation rips you off in a way that they know they can get away with.”
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