Hunting for Fashion's Copycats

A 25-year-old fashion blogger busted the 102-year-old house of Chanel.

When Julie Zerbo heard from two readers of her eight-month-old blog, the Fashion Law, last month saying a bracelet featured prominently in Chanel's recent Fall 2012 runway show seemed familiar, her antennae went up. She looked at the show images online.

"That's when it clicked to me 'oh my God, that's a Chanel bracelet, that's not a Pamela Love bracelet'," she says, referring to the small New York-based jewelry designer. Ms. Zerbo then banged out the blog item "Chanel's Crystal Bangles Look FAMILIAR!" about how the Chanel bangles bore a "striking resemblance" to cuffs in Ms. Love's Fall 2011 collection. She posted the item with side-by-side pictures.

Since the Fashion Law's following is small, Ms. Zerbo alerted the much-larger Fashionista blog, which linked to her post on a Monday. By Tuesday, Chanel issued a statement to Fashionista saying it decided not to offer the bracelets in question for sale "out of respect for the concerns raised."

It was a coup for Ms. Zerbo, a second-year law student at the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America. "To think that the Chanel Fall 2012 collection was somehow affected by me and the Fashion Law is mind-blowing," Ms. Zerbo said on a recent Friday in the lobby cafe of a Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. She typically spends Friday afternoons in the cafe working on her blog when she isn't studying or at her part-time job doing research for the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet.

Ms. Zerbo is one of a breed of fashion bloggers scouring the Internet and stores for instances of similarities or outright copying. Fashionista even has a series called "Adventures in Copyright" devoted to outing alleged copycats. Last month, retailer Topshop removed a dress that looked similar to one by Yasmin Kianfar, a young British designer, after Susanna Lau, founder of the Style Bubble blog, lambasted the British fast-fashion retailer for "aping" the designer in a series of tweets. "Big thank you Susie x," the designer tweeted at Ms. Lau.