One of the most influential voices in the fashion industry right now belongs to Diet Prada, an Instagram account with 1.3 million followers. Tony Liu and Lindsey Schuyler, who met while working at the accessories label Eugenia Kim, started the account in 2014 as a lighthearted way to call out knock-off designs, cheekily showcasing side-by-side images of, say, a Marni rehash of a Prada shirt from a few years earlier. In the past year, though, Diet Prada has become a champion for design integrity and accountability in an industry undergoing upheaval. Liu and Schuyler, who fund the project through branded merchandise and partnerships with select fashion brands, continue to call out too-close-for-comfort imitations by well-known designers including Virgil Abloh, Jason Wu, and Christian Siriano. But Diet Prada is now equally focused on revealing how fast-fashion brands and influencer-owned labels peddle knock-offs from designers too small to fight back. “Young creatives don’t have the resources to battle in court,” says Liu. The pair are also using the account to root out examples of model abuse, misogyny, and racism in the industry. The duo’s efforts last November to highlight a racially charged Dolce & Gabbana ad featuring a Chinese model—along with a series of racist DMs that appeared to be from Stefano Gabbana—reportedly reached Chinese officials, who canceled D&G’s planned Shanghai runway show. “There are many problems in fashion beyond knock-offs,” says Schuyler. “We’ve got a community that wants to hear about these things and keep these people accountable.”
Fast Company: You’ve been a watchdog for the fashion industry, but it seems like you’ve really moved from copycatting into exploring issues of racism, misogyny, and more in the industry. Is that a fair was to describe it?
Lindsey Schuyler: Definitely. As the audience has grown, we’ve seen the scope of issues that people are interested in talking about grow. It’s important to give them a place to discuss these things, because there are so many larger problems in the industry beyond knock-offs.
Tony Liu: When we started, Diet Prada was very much just for fun. We didn’t really know what it would become, even three years into it. It’s just really in the past year that we realized we would do something bigger with this account.
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