Vice-Owned Fashion Mag Honors Lauren Bacall With Balls-Out Plagiarism
Film icon Lauren Bacall died yesterday, and New York Magazine ran a sweet tribute and photo slideshow this morning with the headline "Lauren Bacall Could Teach You a Thing or 2 About Style." And then a couple hours later, the online version of i-D Magazine, owned and published by Vice , ran a sweet one-paragraph tribute to Bacall (Google Cache link) of its own, titled "Lauren Bacall Could Teach You A Thing Or Two About Style," which you have to admit sounds a lot classier without that numeral.
Let's compare the text of the first couple paragraphs of the New York piece, by Sabel Wilkinson and Véronique Hyland, and the sole paragraph of the i-D piece "by" Jack Borkett. Here's Wilkinson and Hyland:
When Lauren Bacall strode into a room -- dress shirt open and tucked into high-waisted pants, a long chain dangling below her braless sternum, sunglasses covering her most of her face -- men practically flew from their chairs at the chance to light her cigarette. Her deep, confident voice, insouciant gaze, and perfectly molded waves made her, perhaps, the original embodiment of Effortless Glamour.
From her early days as a department-store model to her later years as a Hollywood legend, Bacall ... was a style icon in the truest sense of the word ... [On the cover of Harper’s Bazaar ,] she was reimagined as a Red Cross nurse, with red lips, a sultry expression, and what soon became her signature shiny waves.
And here's the text that appeared under Borkett's name:
When Lauren Bacall walked into a room -- shirt open, sunglasses covering most of her face -- men stopped and fell to their knees. Then she spoke. Her deep, confident voice, insouciant gaze and perfectly moulded waves epitomised her as the embodiment of effortless glamour. Aside from her obvious achievements in cinema and modelling, it’s her hair that'll hold a firm place in fashion folklore forever. Take a look at some i-D favourites that have taken inspiration from that famous femme fatale.
The similarities of the two pieces was noticed on Twitter by New York fashion editor Stella Bugbee, and as of now, the i-D post is long gone --- the URL redirects to the website's front page, and the piece has also been removed from Jack Borkett's author page. Which means that it may well be time to start googling phrases at random from Borkett's other works, no? We'll leave you to it.
[ New York / i-D (Google cache link) via tweet by Stella Bugbee]
I'm sorry she's gone. I read her book about going to Africa with Bogart and Hepburn to make "The African Queen," and it made me wish I could meet her. Too bad some jagoff had to make this a story about his lazy ass, instead of the tribute to a fabulous and interesting woman it should have been.
You are correct, life is much easier when you use plagiarism.