The rise and fall of fashion guru Victor Costa who built $50 million business by copying couture designs

A man who was once branded as the ‘king of copying’ has revealed how he built a $50 million business by duplicating couture designs and selling them cheaper – before he was forced to shut down amid sexual harassment claims.

Victor Costa, now 88, from Houston, Texas, realized from a young age that he had an impressive and unusual skill: he was able to look at an item of clothing and recreate it with ease.

He explained to DailyMail.com exclusively that he became ‘enthralled’ by the dresses that he saw in the movies as a kid, and would sketch them to sell the designs for a nickel to dressmakers in his town.

He bought his own sewing machine at age 14, and soon began using his sketches to create and sell prom dresses to his classmates. 

As an adult, he used that ability to launch a booming business called Victor Costa, Inc., which helped provide high fashion pieces to millions across the globe at accessible prices.

He would sit in the audience at fashion shows of high-end designers and sketch the dresses that he saw on the models, only to then remake them and sell them to department stores in New York City.

‘I went to Paris, I paid to get into the Dior show, and for that money I was allowed to take two dresses and copy them,’ he explained to DailyMail.com.

‘You could do it with Balenciaga, Chanel, anything, as long as you paid for the [ticket to the fashion show] you were allowed to do line-for-line copying.

‘I would copy things overnight using the original fabric. I had many all-night sessions. I became known as the best in the business. It was fun.’

His creations were so similar to the originals that even top fashion gurus couldn’t tell the differences sometimes.

He recalled one time when the head of Bonwit Teller, Mildred Custin, came to his showroom and was examining two dresses, one was an original Dior and the other was one of Victor’s copies.

‘She looked at both of them and started yapping at me, criticizing my copying,’ he shared.

‘Finally I said to her, “Go look at the label of the one you’re criticizing.” She was criticizing the original Christian Dior and she liked mine better.’

In his first year, Victor sold $1 million in product, and by 1988, he was grossing $50 million a year.

He was eventually dubbed as the ‘King of Copycats’ – but Victor’s fashion empire came crashing down in the early 1990s after the company became embroiled in scandal.

In 1993, a woman named Lorna Pilgrim claimed that Victor ‘harassed her with humiliating, debasing and degrading verbal attacks, some of them sexual in nature,’ UPI reported.

Victor told DailyMail.com that he had hired Lorna as a model, but started to notice during fittings that her figure had changed.

‘She was carrying a child but I didn’t know she was pregnant. I kept saying to her, “Last week this fit you but now it doesn’t,” and then I found out she was pregnant,’ he said.

‘With that [information] I couldn’t keep her on the payroll. But she ended up suing me for sexual harassment, it was a mess.’

Victor claimed Lorna enjoyed the ‘publicity’ that came from her lawsuit.

It’s unclear what the outcome of the case was, but he insisted to DailyMail.com that she ultimately ‘never got a penny’ from him.

Victor faced another blow in 1995 when he discovered that one of his employees had been secretly ‘stealing’ a lot of the company’s earnings.

He explained that he had hired a ‘young man’ to keep track of the business’ finances.

But after receiving a call from a credit card company, who told him he had fallen behind on his bills, he discovered that the staff member had been using company money to fund his own personal endeavors.

‘He ended up being a thief… He was stealing, building his own house with company money, buying cars for his wife, all kinds of things,’ shared the fashion guru.

‘He was remodeling his house and paying for it with company money. It was a big, big blow to my head to know I was being stolen from. It was a horrible thing to realize.’

Between the sexual harassment lawsuit and the money he had lost from the employee, he was forced to file for bankruptcy and shut down his company.

But Victor didn’t give up. He decided to ‘start again,’ and he launched Victor Costa Occasion Collection through QVC in 2000.

And he certainly came back strong, earning an extensive list of celebrity clients in his later years, including Brook Shields, Ivana Trump, First Ladies Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalynn Carter, and Richard Nixon’s daughters. 

Now, looking back, Victor – who recently released his own memoir, entitled Copycat – told DailyMail.com that he couldn’t be happier with his ‘fairytale’ career.

He also found love later in life, marrying a woman named Jerry Ann Woodfin in 2012.

‘She loves me and we’re very happy. We’ve been married 12 years now,’ he gushed. 

‘We have a beautiful apartment in New York City and a gorgeous country home in upstate New York. We’re pretty happy.’