The Copy Cat Debate

Ele & E-K ask: Is imitation truly the highest form of flattery?

There are three sides to every story – Emm’s, Ele’s, and somewhere in the middle, there’s the truth.

Ele says…

Someone older, and presumably wiser, once said that imitation is the highest form of flattery.

Flattery it may be, irritating it most certainly is. Not to mention creepy.

The compliment, “That’s a lovely (insert whatever you’re wearing here)” is almost-always closely followed by the seemingly harmless, “where did you get it from?”

Harmless that is, until it’s followed by a “How much was it?” “Was it on sale” or worse, “Do you think it will be on sale soon?” Short of asking you to draw them a map with pedestrian directions on it to the store in question, there is nothing you can do from here on in – they will turn up, sooner rather than later wearing the piece of clothing in question, and if tradition is anything to go by, they most likely got it on sale. And not a conciliatory sale either, like a more-than-70%-off kind of affair. Or worse – they look better in it than you do.

We all have heroes that we want to, that we need to, be like. We all went through that stage of wearing one red sock, one blue in honour of Punkie Brewster; most girls have had the bad blonde dye job and worn a knock-off Carrie necklace in honour of Candace Bushnell’s creation; and almost everyone is guilty of wearing that one white glove when Michael Jackson was still cool.

We will be the first to admit that the Savvy Style team are most certainly guilty of this heinous crime. But in our defence, style icons are a dime a dozen, and in a desperate bid to be just like them, we like to think that we have come up with our own eclectic style.

This leads us to a new question – is borrowed style still style?

If the pages of any glossie picked at random is to be believed, yes. Page after page of ‘Get Her Look’; ‘Steal His Style’; ‘They Wear, You Wear’ undermine any traces of originality that any reader once had a however-tenuous grasp on.

Yes, it’s true. Andy Warhol and his postmodernism with fetish for tinned tomato soup and videos of people sleeping proved it – there may very well not be an original style anymore – that nothing is new, that it’s all recycled. Everything old is new again…kind of.

So we have reached the conclusions that copycats are a fact of life. We should learn to accept them even if we don’t embrace them because if we ignore them they certainly won’t go away (although logic would suggest that they would in turn start ignoring themselves). Enough already. What, precisely should you do when you have a copy cat?

You options, indeed, are many and varied.

1.    Mess with them. Sure, they want to be just like you, but how far are they really prepared to have your style.
2.    Take advantage of them. If you and the copy cat are the same size 0- budget alert! Leave magazines out with possible purchases highlighted. Email them potentials all day, every day – eventually it will filter through and you’ll be free to borrow (oh, how the tables have turned…)
3.    Ignore them. Although we’ve already established that this tactic doesn’t work, it certainly fleshes out the options, which don’t seem to be many or varied.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got on this topic. If I’d written the rebuttal, then this piece may have been longer as I would have been able to copy E-K’s column. Sigh. There’s always next time…


Emma-Kate says…

When it comes to clothes deep down consciously or unconsciously we are all copying someone. I know that in an ideal world we could believe that we were of original thought but NEWS FLASH - didn’t someone famous say there is no such thing as an original thought? Whoops. I just copied them.

In my opinion when it comes to the current climate of fashion, original thought is all but a delusion made up by egotistical fashionistas and designers who are living in denial.

New collections? New for you maybe…

As annoying as it is when someone says, “Where did you get that?”, have you ever thought they were asking because they think you look like crap? … Just messing with you.

“Where did you get that?” is annoying but to me so is “inspired by” because when you cut to the chase it’s just the technical term for copied…

Now, before you pipe up I’m not saying that there are not clever people or amazingly creative designers – but original? Not anymore, and if you can prove who in the world of clothes has had a truly original thought in the last twenty years, please let me know.
 
But please don’t waste my time with “so and so put wood with shells…” So did cave men… I don’t care that they teamed waif-thin models with Roman sandals with a Scottish kilt, so did the Celts in their invasion of Rome in the middle ages.

We might say someone’s designs are “fresh” and “innovative” but the truth is when it comes to fashion everything is tired. Sure, some trends have just had a longer disco nap than others, so when a designer says “Let’s do the time warp again” (again) and we all clap our hands with glee at their ‘innovative genius’, would it kill people to get a fricking thesaurus? Innovation means new and forward thinking. Regurgitation might be a better fit…

“Everything old is new again,” you say Ms Glass?  A nice sentiment, but to dob you in my closet copycat friend, let me assure you that just because it’s an old design made new does not mean you thought of it! It means the designer ‘refreshed’ meaning COPIED a.k.a. STOLE like THIEF IN THE NIGHT from an old designer and young people think they came up with it… which is just crap. If anything it shows you are ripping of some old person, and it’s not nice to be mean to old people. It is this demographic whose ideas should be heritage listed as one of only a few replicas of original thought left.

I’d like to know as a fashion editor what you tell yourself when you buy a rival magazine? Do you believe that you are merely perusing the pages so you don’t buy anything that remotely looks like the designers or their models? Or do you consciously rip off the catwalk and present as ‘what’s hot or what’s not’ column? I was in the editorial meeting on Monday – I know the answer to that one.

Maybe if you are so concerned about this degradation of original style you should come up with some new attire for your readers? A hyper colour tee perhaps? How outrageously original.

It must be so hard for you to go against your strong moral code and borrow ideas from others. And even harder when others borrow inspiration from you, which you got from a stylist who got the looks from other stylists, who styled the clothes designed by someone else, someone other than you. Ouch.

Ms Glass, you must feel so sad when you go to sleep at night - sad that you list fashion pieces and put a price to them in the style pages of your website. If it’s anything it’s like a giant sign saying:

“Please copy me and the designers I display because it adds to the popularity of this site and increases my revenue shares.”

The way you make the money that pays for your clothes (that people like to copy) is by presenting the world we live in with a creative display of other people’s intellectual property, much of which is not ironically recreated, copied, or cloned.  It started for you with Punky Brewster and I don’t think the copy cat in you ever stopped – so please stop fooling yourself.

In a fashion sense it makes sense that people can’t help but want to take a piece of your fashion pie. You do, after all, get what you give so copy cat I say this to you: Birds of a feather flock together!

P.S. I love your top that you’re wearing today. Where did you get it from?