Free The Knockoff Economy by Christopher Sprigman Kal Raustiala Page A

design or theme simultaneously, this necessarily must involve copying. In this way copying is essential to fashion. As one astute early observer noted, “If there were not imitation there could be no fashion.” 64 Just as copying is necessary to a trend’s birth, however, it is also a predicate to its death. Copying first makes the trend, and then makes the trend obsolete.
    Copying creates trends by anchoring the new season to a limited number of themes—themes that are freely workable by all producers. For trendy consumers to follow trends, they need to be able to identify them. Anchoring thus encourages buying by conveying to consumers important information about the season’s dominant looks.
    Again, we can’t explain the sudden emergence of a trend—if we could, we would have stopped writing this book and gone to work in New York or Milan. But somehow, trends emerge; firms copy from one another, spin out variations, and diffuse them widely. The result anchors a season’s innovation around a small set of designs, and this helps drive consumption by defining, in a literal sense, what is and is not in style that season. We also see this process at work within a large adjunct to the fashion industry—magazines such as
Glamour
and
Vogue,
television shows such as
What Not to Wear,
and fashion blogs of various stripes, all of which (to differing degrees) provide fashion advice to consumers. These proclamations do not always take root, but they are a constant.
    In the fall of 2005, for example, the
New York Times
described the appearance of a large number of women’s boot designs. The article highlights the unusual existence of
multiple
designs at once:
    There are 60s styles a la Nancy Sinatra; 70s styles a la Stevie Nicks; 80s styles a la Gloria Estefan; and 90s styles a la Shirley Manson. It is a puzzlingsight for fashion seers used to declaring that one style of boot—Midcalf! Thigh high!—is The One for Fall. 65
    The writer’s expectation—which the style promiscuity of 2005 violated—is that the industry will anchor narrowly. And it usually does.
    This is not to say that the styles produced by closely watched designers always resonate with consumers, or with retailers that must make decisions about purchases well before the clothes hit the racks. But it is undeniable that particular designs are identified as anchoring trends—“Midcalf boots are The One for Fall”—and that these trends wax and wane, only to be replaced by the next set of themes.
    To summarize, copying plays two central but counterintuitive roles in fashion. By allowing others to imitate and rework successful designs, copying acts like a turbocharger that spins the fashion cycle faster. Designs quickly go up, and then even more quickly they come down. We call this induced obsolescence, and this process forces designers to innovate anew. Apparel designs don’t become obsolete because a “better” design comes along. They become obsolete because they become too popular. Copying also wraps the incredibly varied output of the fashion world around a few key trends—and it is through the emergence of trends that most of us understand what to wear that season or year. We call this process anchoring.
    These twin forces have dished up a huge, vibrant, innovative market—with lots of copying. In fashion, the freedom to imitate turns out to be a very powerful economic spur to innovation. Copying helps to kill popular designs and birth new ones. And copying helps to reduce the search costs of style. This is the piracy paradox—and it is the primary way in which fashion reconciles imitation with innovation.
N ORMS AND F IRST -M OVER A DVANTAGE
    Let’s briefly consider some other arguments that might explain why fashion creativity thrives despite copying. The first focuses on the possible effect of social norms, which play an important role in some other industries we explore in this book. Norms have been the subject of a lot of academic research.