One of the magical side effects of having a culture of copying is the establishment of trends. People think this is a magical thing. How does it happen? Because it’s legal [in the fashion industry] for people to copy one another.

Johanna Blakley, a cultural critic and managing director at USC’s Norman Lear Center, made this remark while discussing how intellectual-property law operates differently in fashion than in many other creative industries. In talks and interviews about “fashion’s free culture,” she argues that the relative legality of copying garments (compared with music, film, or software) helps explain fashion’s rapid cycle of novelty. The comment is typically framed as a counterintuitive observation: instead of stronger copyright protections producing more creativity, the fashion industry’s permissive copying environment can accelerate diffusion, competition, and the emergence of recognizable trends.

Blakley’s point is that trends are not mysterious eruptions of collective taste; they are an emergent property of a system where imitation is easy and largely lawful. When designs can be copied quickly, ideas spread across price points and brands, creating shared visual “signals” that many people encounter at once—what we then call a trend. The quote also challenges the assumption that strict IP enforcement is always pro-innovation. In Blakley’s view, fashion shows how copying can function as a creative engine: it intensifies rivalry, forces differentiation, and keeps the industry in motion through continual iteration rather than exclusive ownership.