Why Trelise Cooper got angry and asked me to leave

The say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but in the big-bucks world of fashion designing, where does flattery end?

Many designer fashion brands, such as Gucci, Prada and Balenciaga, often find their designs being copied and re-jigged for the masses in the popular high street retail chain stores weeks, sometimes days, after they've hit the runway.

Now our very own Trelise Cooper has been caught up in a wrangle over a ribbon pattern design that's already appearing in a run-of-the-mill chain store, and she's angry about it.

At the Trelise Cooper show on Wednesday night something familiar caught my eye. I'd tried it on a couple of weeks ago... in London! On sale! In Topshop!

What's it doing here on a catwalk in a New Zealand Fashion Week collection?!

Check out the grey wool jersey on the right with the giant red sequin bow detail that Trelise sent down her catwalk from her new 2010 collection on Wednesday night.

Now compare it to the grey wool jersey with the giant red sequin bow detail on the left by German-born designer Markus Lupfer for British high-street retailer Topshop last season. It went on sale in July for 85 quid (NZ$190).

The patterns look exactly the same to my eye. Cooper she's not heard of Lupfer.

"I got offered that in April this year. I got offered that embroidery. My knitter needs three months for production and I got the piece back in July, the same month it came out in Topshop. I didn't even know it was in Topshop.

"It's devastating to have that happen. This makes me cross that this has happened."

She suspects the embroidery designer sold the same piece to her and Lupfer.

As soon as I presented both images alongside each other to Cooper, the fashion designer stormed off.

She returned and confronted me, saying: "You never disappoint, Rachel. I don't know how you live with yourself." Then she asked me to leave. "Just go! Go, please."

Before I showed her the photographs, Cooper said the grey jersey "was offered to me through one of our makers... we reshaped it." She said she had not heard of Lupfer.

On Saturday, Cooper blamed the supplier, and had a message for him: "Don't do it to me. We have mean media in New Zealand who point it out."

She said she had stopped using local designers because some copied the likes of Donna Karen and Hugo Boss.

So Cooper is an innocent victim in this. But what will Cooper's Rich List society customers such as Gilda Kirkpatrick, Amanda Hotchin and Robyn Hart, who happily splurge big bucks on their expensive designer clothes, think about something practically identical hanging on the rack at the cheap-as-chips mainstream fashion chain?

Click here to listen to Rachel being interviewed by Marcus Lush on RadioLive about the Cooper fashion wrangle.

Rachel Glucina

Pictured: The sweater on the right is Trelise Cooper's. The one on the left is from a UK store. Photos / Getty Images, Supplied