2 weeks Ago By Sandra E. Garcia
The oversize beige cable-knit sweater. The centre-parted hair. The right knee pointed out, creating a curve at her left hip.
Practically every detail in the photo — right down to the matching short set — looked familiar to Sydney Gifford. So did the woman posed in front of the nondescript white wall. Days earlier, Gifford, a 24-year-old lifestyle influencer, had shared a photo with her thousands of followers that was virtually identical.
The woman in this new photo was a fellow influencer, Alyssa Sheil, with whom she had gone shopping and done a photo shoot months earlier. At the time, she thought their interactions had been merely awkward. But as she scrolled through Sheil’s photos on Instagram for the first time in nearly a year, she said, Gifford suspected those meetings had been some kind of aesthetic espionage.
Influencers Sydney Gifford (left) and Alyssa Sheill. Credit: @sydneynicoleslone/ @alyssasheill Gifford claims that Sheil, 21, not only started to mimic her online persona but also appropriated her entire look. And now she is suing.
Gifford had copyrighted several of her social media posts in January after noticing the similarity between Sheil’s posts and her own. Several photos were submitted as evidence in the lawsuit Gifford filed this year in a federal court in Texas accusing Sheil of copyright infringement. But in the carefully curated world of social media, Giffords has levelled a perhaps more severe charge against her: stealing her vibe.
“This isn’t a coincidence,” Gifford, who has about 300,000 followers on Instagram and more than 500,000 on TikTok, recalled thinking. “Something is definitely happening here.” What might appear to be a superficial spat over sweaters and hairstyles could be a legal fight that gets at the heart of social media influence.
The very nature of successful trendsetting requires some degree of replication. As much as platforms such as TikTok and Instagram may seem like free-for-alls, lifestyle influencers exist in an ecosystem that prizes homogeneity – one of the surer ways to appease the algorithms that are the ultimate arbiters of their success online..
