Has Instagram Helped Or Hurt The Fight Against Fashion Plagiarism?

It’s been seven years since the birth of Instagram. Seven pretty great years, if you ask most people who indulge in a regular scroll. In its short life, Instagram has grown from an image editing app (remember editing a photo on Instagram only to upload it to Facebook?) into a handheld gallery space and inspiration database. It’s created fanbases for otherwise ordinary people and lucrative careers for others. It’s initiated a lot of cultural change, especially within the art world, reshaping how we talk about artistic plagiarism. Plagiarism has always been a dirty word in the arts. For decades, creatives and legal teams have dealt with cases involving copyright infringement. But before the internet (and more specifically, the Instagram era), incidents of plagiarism rarely came to our attention. Without Instagram as an access-all-areas archive, when two designers or artists came out with a similar idea, likeness would either go unnoticed, be handled privately, or put down to creative coincidence. After all, it is possible for two people to share an idea, right? Read more at i-D.