A small victory for a designer whose kitten leggings were lifted by the retailer.
Max Cattaneo owns a small clothing label called Wowch that sells shirts and other apparel with whimsically hip images of animals, particularly cats. Cats with third eyes, cats riding in a hearse, cats jumping out of a slice of pizza. It's all painfully cool and the kind of stuff Urban Outfitters knows would be catnip for its customers — especially one particular item: black leggings with cute little kitten faces on the knees.
Until today, Urban Outfitters was selling a very similar version of the leggings on its site. Cattaneo had been contacting them, trying to get them to remove the item. After BuzzFeed contacted UO for comment, they took down the item from the site. A company spokesperson said:
We take these matters very seriously. Urban Outfitters did not design or produce the cat leggings currently being sold on our website. The leggings were purchased from a third party vendor. Urban Outfitters does not support copying of designs nor do our customers. It is never our intention to offend other designers and small businesses. Because we take these matters so seriously, the cat leggings have been removed from our website, which we have informed the third party vendor and the designer Alex [sic] Wowch.
The item is no longer available on the UO site as of this afternoon.
