You pull on a plain black dress, or a pair of trainers with a cream sole, and it feels like your own decision.
It is, mostly. But somewhere behind that choice sits a chain of copying that may run back a century, to one designer in Paris or one young woman on a London street.
Fashion history is usually told as a parade of geniuses. The more interesting story is about the rest of us: why millions of people decide, within a few seasons, to dress like a handful of individuals. Psychologists and anthropologists have a fairly clear answer, and it has less to do with vanity than with how human beings learn.
Below are six people whose choices escaped the catwalk, and what research says about how their taste travelled.
We are built to copy the people others watch
In 2001 the anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White published an influential paper in Evolution and Human Behavior on what they called prestige. Their argument was theoretical rather than experimental, but it has shaped a generation of research on cultural learning.
The idea runs like this. For most of human history, working out who knew how to hunt, heal or build was hard. A shortcut was to watch who everyone else was watching, then copy that person, often broadly rather than precisely. Henrich and Gil-White suggested that the respect we freely give admired people is partly a way of getting close enough to learn from them.
That shortcut is not fussy. We copy the successful person’s useful skills, but we also copy their haircut, their slang and their coat. Researchers call this prestige bias, and fashion is one of its most visible playgrounds.
Taste is contagious, but it is never caught at random.
It also helps explain why familiarity matters so much. Once a look appears on someone we admire, we start to see it everywhere, and the mere exposure effect does the rest: things we see repeatedly start to feel right.
Chanel, 1926: the dress Vogue compared to a car
On 1 October 1926, American Vogue printed a drawing of a simple, long-sleeved black Chanel dress. According to the FIDM Museum in Los Angeles, the magazine likened it to Henry Ford’s mass-produced motor car and called it “the frock that all the world will wear”.
The comparison was the point. A Ford was useful, repeatable and available to the many. Black, until then, had leaned towards mourning and servants’ uniforms. Gabrielle Chanel had been making black dresses for years and referred to them as “little nothing dresses”, with “little” meaning simplicity rather than size.
What made it spread was not just elegance. It was easy to copy. A dress with no fussy trimming could be reproduced by dressmakers and department stores at every price, so prestige at the top met convenience at the bottom. The logic still sits behind every tailored basic that earns its cost per wear.
Dior, 1947: 15 metres of fabric in a rationed world
On 12 February 1947, Christian Dior showed his first collection in Paris. He called it the Corolle line. Carmel Snow, editor of American Harper’s Bazaar, named it something catchier on the spot: the New Look.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds the collection’s best-known piece, the Bar suit, notes that a typical New Look woollen day dress used about 15 metres of fabric, and a short taffeta evening gown about 25 metres. The Bar jacket alone took 3.7 metres of silk shantung. The suit cost 59,000 francs.
Britain was still rationing. The Board of Trade tried to discourage the style, and the waste of cloth provoked real anger. It did not matter. The V&A describes the look as unstoppable, helped by a private showing for Princess Margaret at the French Embassy in London.
This is trickle-down fashion in its purest form, the pattern the German sociologist Georg Simmel described in 1904: elites adopt a style to stand apart, the next tier copies it to climb, and by the time it reaches the high street, the elite has moved on.
For war-weary women, the New Look also offered a story: abundance after scarcity. Prestige told people what to want, and emotion told them why.
Mary Quant: when the street gave the orders
By the 1960s the ladder was starting to wobble. Mary Quant had opened her shop, Bazaar, in Chelsea in 1955, and became the name most associated with the miniskirt, which she named after her favourite make of car.
Yet Quant was candid about where the idea came from. “It was the girls on King’s Road who invented the mini,” she said, as quoted in her obituaries when she died in April 2023, aged 93.
That line captures a shift sociologists were noticing. In 1974 the American sociologist Paul Blumberg wrote that the previous decade had seen more “percolating up from the bottom than trickling down from the top”. Fashion writers now call this bubble-up: a style begins among young people or subcultures, and designers with prestige pick it up, polish it and send it back out.
Quant’s genius was to act as an amplifier. She took something already happening on the pavement and gave it a label, a shop and a face. The street supplied the idea; the designer supplied the permission.
Saint Laurent, 1966: the tuxedo that got women turned away
In 1966 Yves Saint Laurent put women in a dinner suit, Le Smoking. He later explained his reasoning simply: men looked good in tuxedos, and the cut flattered everyone.
The public was less relaxed. WWD has recorded that when the singer Françoise Hardy wore one to the opera in Paris it caused a scandal, and that the socialite Nan Kempner was refused entry to a Manhattan restaurant in hers. She took off the trousers and wore the jacket as a minidress.
That story is a lesson in how norms move. A garment that breaks a rule needs people with enough social standing to absorb the backlash. Hardy, Catherine Deneuve and Betty Catroux had that standing, and each appearance made the next one less shocking. Saint Laurent went on to design more than 230 versions over his career.
Today a woman in a tuxedo barely raises an eyebrow, which is the surest sign the idea won. The long road from scandal to staple runs straight through current gender-neutral fashion.
Diana: a polo-match jumper and a $1.1m afterlife
In June 1981, shortly after her engagement, Lady Diana Spencer arrived at a polo match in a red jumper covered in white sheep, with one black sheep in the middle. It was made by a small knitwear label, Warm & Wonderful, run by Sally Muir and Joanna Osborne.
Its afterlife says a great deal about prestige. The original, found in a box in Osborne’s attic in March 2023, went to auction at Sotheby’s with an estimate of $50,000 to $80,000.
It sold for about $1.1m in September 2023, reported Al Jazeera, after bidding jumped from $190,000 in the final 15 minutes. It was the highest price paid at auction for any Diana garment, and the most valuable sweater ever sold at auction.
Nobody paid $1.1m for the wool. They paid for proximity to a person millions felt they knew. That is prestige bias stripped to its core, and it is also a warning against reading auction prices as proof of anything except collectors’ passion.
Diana understood the power herself. In June 1997 she sold 79 of her gowns at Christie’s in New York, raising about $3.25m for the Royal Marsden Hospital Cancer Fund and the AIDS Crisis Trust. The top lot, a Victor Edelstein velvet gown she wore to the White House in 1985, fetched $222,500.
Virgil Abloh, 2018: streetwear walks into the palace
Virgil Abloh met Kanye West in 2009 while working at a screen-printing shop and founded his label, Off-White, in 2013. In 2018 Louis Vuitton made him artistic director of menswear, the first Black person to hold that role at the house.
He called his method a “3% approach”: change an existing design by about 3% and you have something new. Critics said that made him a repackager. His defenders said that was exactly the talent, and the tributes after his death from cancer in November 2021, aged 41, suggest the industry agreed. On taking the Vuitton job he said he now had “a platform to change the industry.”
Abloh’s career completed the circle Quant started. Bubble-up was no longer a rebellion against luxury. It was luxury’s main supply line, with hoodies, trainers and logos travelling from skate parks to Paris and back to the high street at full price.
The people who change fashion rarely invent from nothing. They give permission.
Six icons, one pattern
| Icon | Year | What changed | Why it spread |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gabrielle Chanel | 1926 | Black became chic, not mournful | Simple to copy at any price |
| Christian Dior | 1947 | Full skirts, nipped waists | Elite prestige plus post-war longing |
| Mary Quant | 1960s | The mini went mainstream | Street idea given a brand and a shop |
| Yves Saint Laurent | 1966 | Women in tuxedos | High-status wearers absorbed the scandal |
| Diana, Princess of Wales | 1981 | A playful knit became a famous image | Global fame and emotional attachment |
| Virgil Abloh | 2018 | Streetwear at the top of luxury | Bubble-up culture with a luxury house behind it |
Look across the rows and a pattern appears. Every one of these changes needed two things: a person with enough visibility to make the choice feel safe, and a design simple enough, or emotionally loaded enough, for millions of others to copy.
The catch: copying kills the thing it copies
If imitation were the whole story, every trend would last for ever. Research suggests the opposite force is just as strong.
In a 2008 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the marketing researchers Jonah Berger and Chip Heath reported seven studies on why people drop tastes. In one field study, undergraduates stopped wearing a particular charity wristband once students from a nearby dormitory, seen on campus as academically intense and “geeky”, started wearing it too.
Their explanation was identity signalling. We use clothes to say who we are, so when a group we do not want to be mistaken for adopts a look, the signal gets muddied and we move on. It is a single campus, and a field study cannot rule out every alternative, but the pattern fits what fashion insiders see each season.
A second study by Berger, this time with Gaël Le Mens, looked at speed. Writing in PNAS in 2009, they analysed baby names over roughly a century of French and US birth records, plus a survey of 661 expectant parents. Names that rose quickly also fell quickly: a name adopted 10% faster had a 12.5% higher risk of being abandoned. Parents saw fast-rising names as fads and avoided them.
Names are not hemlines, and these are correlations, not controlled experiments. Still, the logic transfers neatly to clothes. A look that explodes overnight on social media tends to feel dated just as fast.
Every trend carries the seeds of its own funeral.
That is why the six icons above are unusual. Their ideas did not just spread; they settled. The little black dress, the trouser suit and the luxury trainer survived because they stopped signalling a moment and started doing a job.
2025: the house that started it all, back in one pair of hands
The cycle keeps turning. On 2 June 2025, Dior named the Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson creative director of its women’s, men’s and haute couture collections, reported the Irish Times, the first designer to hold all three since Christian Dior himself.
Whatever he does with the house’s archive, including the Bar jacket, will be read through the same lens: a prestigious name signalling what is next, and millions deciding, consciously or not, whether to follow.
Borrowing taste without losing your own
None of this means your style is fake. Copying admired people is how humans have always learned, and it often leads somewhere good. The trick is to notice when you are borrowing a signal rather than choosing a garment.
Try this before your next buy
- Name the source. Ask whose image first made you want it. A friend, a celebrity, an influencer? Knowing the source makes the pull easier to judge.
- Check the speed. If an item went from nowhere to everywhere in weeks, Berger and Le Mens’s findings suggest it may fade just as fast.
- Look for the job. The pieces that outlived their icons, from the black dress to the trouser suit, solved a practical problem. Does this one?
- Give it a wardrobe test. If it works with three things you already own, it belongs in a capsule wardrobe. If not, it may be a signal you are renting.
And notice how clothes change you as well as how they look to others. The research on enclothed cognition is more mixed than early headlines suggested, but the feeling of wearing something that is truly yours is real enough.
Chanel, Dior, Quant, Saint Laurent, Diana and Abloh each gave millions of people a little courage to dress differently. The best way to honour that is not to copy them exactly. It is to borrow the courage, and spend it on yourself.
Sources
- Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196. DOI
- Berger, J., & Heath, C. (2008). Who drives divergence? Identity signaling, outgroup dissimilarity, and the abandonment of cultural tastes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(3), 593–607. Link
- Berger, J., & Le Mens, G. (2009). How adoption speed affects the abandonment of cultural tastes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(20), 8146–8150. DOI
- Victoria and Albert Museum. (n.d.). Bar suit, Christian Dior, 1947 [Collection record]. Link
- FIDM Museum. (2015). Fundraising Friday: Chanel’s little black dress. Link
- Al Jazeera. (2023, September 15). Princess Diana’s iconic ‘Black Sheep’ sweater sells at auction for $1.1m. Link
- WBEZ Chicago. (2021, November 29). Fashion designer Virgil Abloh dies of cancer at 41. Link
Updated 17 October 2026: we rewrote this article with new research, current figures and sources. Cover photo: Kenula Abeywickrama on Unsplash. Charts and graphics: Something Navy.
How we reported this. We went back to the original research for this story, 7 sources in all, listed above, and checked every figure against them. If you think we have got something wrong, tell us and we will look at it. Read more about how we work.
