Fashion’s New Vigilantes Out to Expose Copycat Designers

Diet Prada is an online website that does something that no one in the fashion industry ever dared do before. It names and shames, to use its own tagline, "ppl knocking each other off lol." In an industry that has tacitly accepted a certain ebb and flow of ideas for decades, the only pre-social media authority that might have addressed copying were magazines and trade publications, but they were too heavily reliant on advertisers to bite the hand that fed them. Enter the audacious duo of Tony Liu and Lindsey Schuyler, founders of Diet Prada, both trained in fashion design and history of fashion and working in the industry. In just three years they have gained 220K followers––including Rihanna and Naomi Campbell––and have been aggressively trolled by Stefano Gabbana. In response to the Italian designer’s latest controversial statement, “I’m not gay, I’m a man” Diet Prada posted a video of a D&G label being set on fire. No one escapes their cross hairs, including revered British Designer of the Year, Jonathan Anderson, and NYC-based name on everyone’s lips, Virgil Abloh, whose label Off-White Diet Prada referred to as “a busy luxury knockoff business.”