The Fashion Industry: Diet Prada’s Victim
By Genevieve Betancourt
Web design by Hugh Ferguson
Our real-world Gossip Girl moment is here. Just replace GossipGirl.com with @diet_prada on Instagram and “Manhattan’s Upper East Siders” with fashion’s biggest names, and you’ve got it. What started out as “just for fun” (according to one of Diet Prada’s co-founders in an interview with Fast Company) has now become one of the most influential social media pages in fashion.
Diet Prada is an Instagram account (@diet_prada) that shares fashion news such as industry updates and runway reviews, but it is best known for publicizing unethical behavior from industry professionals. Its posts generate high engagement via comments, likes, and shares. As a result, the page’s fanbase (referred to as “Dieters”) are known for going to said industry professionals’ social media accounts and flooding their comments and DMs with their opinions on what Diet Prada has reported on. Oftentimes, this results in action from those posted about – apology posts, comment sections being disabled or limited, or sometimes even accounts going private or being deleted. To put it simply, being posted about on Diet Prada is usually a PR nightmare.
The page is run by two fashion “insiders,” Tony Liu and Lindsey Schuyler. While Liu and Schuyler originally created the page to share their hobby for finding and collaging runway lookalike moments, their account’s content has expanded and the page has become, in some ways, a threat to the fashion industry—much like Gossip Girl was to the teens living in the early 2000s’ Upper East Side. Diet Prada has been described by The Business of Fashion as “the most feared Instagram account,” by Fast Company as “one of the most influential voices in the fashion industry,” and ELLE Magazine as a “fashion-industry watchdog.”
Because of the way the account functions and followers interact with it, Diet Prada has democratized the fashion industry. Never before have normal, non-fashion-industry individuals been given such a visible platform to share their opinions of fashion brands and fashion professionals. Gone are the days in which industry and large-publication’s authority reigned over what information was given to the general public—now a DM from a small designer claiming that WeWoreWhat designer Danielle Bernstein had stolen their designs gets hundreds of thousands of likes and views. Diet Prada helps many smaller players in the industry feel heard.
Bernstein’s controversial history in the fashion industry is probably one of the greatest examples. From her Lulu DK x WeWoreWhat jewelry line for Nordstrom that was “inspired” by pieces—from small designers to Tiffany & Co.—in her own personal jewelry collection back in 2018 to designing a dress very similar to one froom We Are KIN in 2021, Bernstein has been called out time and time again for plagiarizing other designers’ work. Back in 2018, Diet Prada’s post about the jewelry collection garnered almost ten thousand likes and resulted in the removal of certain pieces from the line and Nordstrom publicizing a statement saying that it would not sell the “pieces in question.” In 2021, another post about We Are KIN received over 127,000 likes and thousands of comments. Personally, I hadn’t heard of WeWoreWhat or Danielle Bernstein until the aforementioned post, and I will never be purchasing from her or any of her collaborations thanks to Diet Prada—and from looking at the comments, it seems that many are on a similar page. While We Are KIN and other brands have fallen victim to Bernstein’s tactics, more and more consumers are turning away from ever purchasing or supporting Berstein in solidarity of small designers, setting the tone for other large influencers and bloggers.
The page is also known for exposing big names in the industry, often inadvertently sending brigades of “Dieters” to flood the DMs and comment sections of the account’s latest target. For instance, Michael Gaubert (@michelgaubert), a French DJ that has worked for Chanel, Dior, Valentino, Loewe, and Fendi, posted a video to his Instagram of a dinner with friends where they each wore personally-decorated slanted-eye masks and yelled, “Wuhan girls.” Another attendee of the dinner, Marie Beltrami (@mariebeltrami) reposted the post. Though both posts were taken down shortly after, neither were taken down fast enough to prevent Diet Prada from getting a recording of the video and a picture of one of the masks.
The Diet Prada post depicts 10 items, including the video of the event set besides one of the masks that was worn; the screen recording of Gaubert’s original post captioned, “This Masquerade @mariebeltrami”; and screenshots of influencers Susie Bubble’s and Bryan Boy’s responses on social media. Diet Prada elaborates in the caption, “See how this shit is so normalized? This is how centuries of imperialism and Orientalism manifests itself.” Both Gaubert and Beltrami had to turn off the comments on their entire feed previous to the posts, and Beltrami still limits her comments today.
Following the backlash, Gaubert posted a hasty, half-hearted, “I-got-caught-and-need-to-keep-my-job” post that had to be taken down due to the see-through nature of the attempt. One Chinese American influencer, Tina Chen Craig, even said, “his insincere non-apology is almost as offensive as his ‘Wuhan girl’ party video post.” He then posted two more apology-letter posts, both of which were liked on Instagram by the Diet Prada account. While many didn’t feel that what Gaubert did was enough for the 393,000 followers worth of damage that he created, his apology posts seem to have done the trick for the fashion industry.
On the other hand, Beltrami did absolutely nothing to repair her damage. With some further digging, Diet Prada and Susie Bubble discovered that the woman had championed 6 years worth of yellowface masks and racist caricatures. Beltrami never issued an apology statement for any of it, and went on to battle against Dieters and others who caught wind of the situation in the comment section. At times, she called commenters racist themselves or went as far as to DM commenter’s accounts with the same rhetoric. Aside from social media metrics, it is not evident whether she understands the gravity of her actions today or whether she has learned from her mistakes.
Through the ups and downs of this scandal, one thing was for certain: Large players in the fashion world are aware that their actions have consequences. According to Susie Bubble’s investigations, past yellowface masks had originally been made for an edition of Harper’s Bazaar US, meaning that at some point in the recent past, they were okay-enough to be considered for one of the world’s biggest fashion publications. Now (largely thanks to Diet Prada), individual people are held accountable for their ignorance and harm towards minority communities, and their professions and image are at stake—as well as those of their partners—if they don’t apologize.
Although Diet Prada works on revealing the wrongdoings of big names in the world of fashion, it doesn’t fail on reporting on designers from all rungs of the ladder. Take for instance the Brooklyn indie brand, Meg by Meghan Kinney. The designer was caught red handed for not one but two counts of unauthorized reproduction of artists’ work, namely: João Incerti (@o_incerti) and Brendan Fagan (@judithsupine). Both cases were shared by the account only days apart.
Brendan Fagan’s case was the first to air on Instagram. The most interesting thing about the post was that it was one of the first regarding two indie artists – one the perpetrator and the other the victim. We’d like to think it’s a game of big players versus small ones, but Meghan Kinney proved that the art of stealing art from other artists isn’t reserved to big and powerful corporations.
Fagan, a Mexico City-based artist, shared screenshots of his email conversations with Meghan Kinney after learning that the clothing designer and business owner had used his print, which she had discovered after purchasing it as a wallpaper—for which he did approve its use of—for her bathroom, in her 2020 clothing line. She even posted to Instagram, “We’re so excited about the ‘head turning’ abilities of this print ;) just in stock our new faces print (inspired by wallpaper in my bathroom 😂).” Fagan said that he had turned down brands “many times...regardless of [the] money.” After seeing Kinney’s design bearing his disrespectfully-used print, he said, “Meg’s clothes are not something I would wear, not something my friends would wear. I dislike middle of the road fashion.”
After getting a lawyer, it was later revealed to Fagan that it would take more money than would be reasonable to recover any of the damages he saw fit, and so Fagan was left to sit back as Meg retained her $4,855.97 worth of revenue produced from the line using his print, and continued to sell the line even after Fagan had sent her a cease & desist letter. The only thing he would be given for his work and the ability for Kinney to use it without his permission was $950, or a 15% royalty, that Kinney so graciously offered to Venmo or PayPal the very next day. Fagan responded saying that “It felt grossly insulting to be offered $950 by someone that stole my art for their own personal gain.”
Incerti’s Diet Prada post came two days later, captioned, “Newsflash @megbymeghankinney : No one cares if your business suffered during the pandemic if you’ve exploited indie creators for your personal gain.” João Incerti came out about his art being stolen by Kinney after having seen the attention that Fagan was able to get from over 70,000 people on the internet. With no surprise, the internet was witness to Incerti’s post displaying his work next to a piece of Kinney’s clothing designs made with his print, “Cachos de Tucano,” portuguese for “Crazy Toucans.”
Incerti captioned the post saying, “Sometimes we get used to people copying our job, it happens more often that (sic) you can imagine, but @diet_prada made me found (sic) this one and i (sic) decided to post this time. Hope you hire your own surface designer soon megbymeghankinney 😩 #incertipatterns.” His post received 11,049 likes, and Diet Prada’s received over 68,000. His design was used on a skirt, jacket, and jumpsuit designed by Kinney, with prices ranging from $249 to $289. Diet Prada captioned the post saying, “Kinney has come a long way from planting roots as an indie designer in the East Village in the mid-1990s. The FIT-trained student’s business has since grown to include five stores in NYC and one in Toronto… enough time to pick up some super shady habits, but apparently not enough to figure out how to hire their own print designer.” Since then, there is no Instagram account that exists under the handle @megbymeghankinney; the brand’s Twitter is private; the engagement on her Facebook page is poor; and the Pinterest account does not exist. Kinney continues to sell clothes and it looks like her stores are still open, but it seems that she has retreated from social media for the time being.
Fagan and Incerti are not the only creatives who have been cheated, stolen, and undervalued by other, big or small, players in their industries. Their ability to reach out to accounts like Diet Prada to help spread the word of their injustice at the hands of others, and the results that decisions like those create, are a testament to the power of social media and Diet Prada’s ability to stand for those who previously had no way to voice the gross ways that they are taken advantage of. Fagan’s and Incerti’s decisions to stand up for themselves is an inspiration to other artists that have faced the same, knowing that while they may never receive what they deserve, they are at least preventing other artists from being hurt and from hurting the chances of their perpetrators from doing the same again.
The account has its negatives and positives, but putting both aside, they are a powerhouse changing the power dynamics in the fashion industry. The interactions between the public and large brands or powerful influencers no longer have one-sided weight. Now a single DM to Diet Prada from a frustrated, concerned, or saddened individual can lead to a post with hundreds of thousands of likes and apology posts from brands and individuals that would have previously never been held accountable or felt the need to respond to their mistakes. Whether Diet Prada should hold its targets to more long-term responsibility for their actions is debated by many, and some even suggest Dieters turn their support from the social media account to organizations that promote long-term change, like the Black In Fashion Council and the Fifteen Percent Pledge. I agree, but it won’t stop me from checking every now and then to see who Diet Prada has targeted next.
