Want A Free Mary Katrantzou Dress? Don't Press Copyright Charges

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Talk to a clothing designer about inspiration for a collection and you're likely to get an abstract answer like "Late Eighteenth Century wet grass on a spring morning" or "blue," but occasionally a piece's inspiration can be traced to a more specific influence. That's exactly what Geneva-based collector Adwoa Bagalini found when she looked at a certain Mary Katrantzou red dress shown a couple weeks ago at London's Fashion Week and saw her old Olivetti Lettera 35 typewriter. She explains in Retro Tech Geneva, her blog on all things outmoded and techy, that Katrantzou's dress was the spitting image of a picture that she took of her old typewriter. But instead of pressing charges for copyright, Bagalini wrote a friendly letter to Katrantzou, who in return acknowledged the direct inspiration and then sent Bagalini her very own typewriter dress.

· How a Swiss Typewriter Collector Scored a Free Mary Katrantzou Dress [The Cut]
· Olivetti Lettera 35: Revisited and reinvented in RED [Retro Tech Geneva]