Why Fashion’s Plagiarism Problem Will Never Go Away

Bitchy broadsides and oodles of brouhaha are part of what makes fashion fun. They are also inevitable in a business so densely populated by thin-skinned designers on fat pay cheques. Of all the professional criticisms that you might level at a fashion designer, the absolute worst – worse even than being vulgar or banal – is that she or he is in any way a copycat. For this strikes right to the heart of the perception, so carefully cultivated yet very rarely actually true, that clothes designers regularly come up with entirely new ideas. This year the absolute worst has happened, again and again. Planet fashion has been at turns titillated and appalled by @diet_prada, an anonymous vigilante Instagram account dedicated to accusing designers and labels of fashion plagiarism – or “ppl knocking each other off lol”, as the account’s bio puts it. It has been unafraid to call out sacred designer cows – including Céline, Balenciaga, J.W. Anderson, YSL, Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana – for what it contends are dresses, shoes, bags and even chairs and fashion-show sets that are based on other people’s work. Read more at The Economist.