Can you ever really own an aesthetic? Creatives discuss what happens when your style becomes a trend

Success in the creative industry can often seem just out of reach. Like many creatives, I’ve spent at least a few late nights scrolling through the feed of a designer whose work I love, imagining what it would be like to have their client list. But what happens when the dream of success becomes reality, and your unique personal style doesn’t just resonate, but solidifies itself as the look of the moment? Artists whose aesthetic has transcended their individual hand to become a broader visual trend must navigate the rewards and difficulties of their personal styles becoming public domain – and grapple with what it means for their artistic signatures to spiral beyond their control.

Of course, not everyone cares about authenticity. As corporations and brands seek to capitalise on trending aesthetics, they often opt for imitators who can replicate a style without the initial creator’s premium — a practice that significantly undercuts artists’ ability to benefit financially from their own influence. More disconcertingly, this increase in practitioners is often used as a leveraging tactic to gain access to an original maker for less. David Rudnick, a prominent graphic designer known for his work in fashion and music, describes encountering “mafioso-style” methods of intimidation, whereby clients share moodboards filled with his own work while lowballing on budget. “It’s as if they’re putting a gun to your head, asking: ‘Do you want to do this for almost no money or do you want us to hire someone else to copy you?’” he says.

Robert Beatty, a Lexington, Kentucky-based artist and musician, echoes this sentiment, mentioning several experiences when major corporations tried to strong-arm him into making work for less. “I can name so many companies who simply hired somebody to copy me when I said no to their measly budget,” he says, listing examples from fast-food conglomerates to major tech companies that publicly claim to champion creativity, yet have unashamedly exploited his work. He adds “I think at this point creative agencies just get me to sign NDAs about projects they never intend to hire me for so I won’t call them out when they poorly imitate my work.”

Even when companies do hire the originating artist, relinquishing your style to a brand can have complex implications. Tomi Um, a Helsinki-based editorial illustrator, encountered widespread visibility when her Where’s Waldo-style illustrations were used for a multi-city campaign by mattress brand Casper. Tomi only spoke positively about her experiences on the project — noting that the teams at Casper and Red Antler (the agency behind the campaign) were nothing but respectful — and shared her gratefulness for large-scale projects like this that enabled her to move beyond the “complete survival mode” of struggling for years as an illustrator to make ends meet. But I do wonder how the overwhelming association of her aesthetic with one particular company affected how her portfolio was perceived afterwards. Even though Um developed her distinctive, puzzle-like illustration approach long before her collaboration with Casper, the overwhelming use of her work by the brand seems likely to have complicated her ability to claim independent ownership of the style she developed, and may potentially limit her ability to do similar work for other clients in the future. Unlike editorial illustration, where artists are named and credited, this type of commissioned branding work is more akin to work-for-hire, a legal setup where ownership of work belongs to a third party rather than its creator. When a brand adopts an illustrator’s visual language en masse, the artist’s identity is obscured by the brand’s larger creative output: “Tomi Um’s style” quickly becomes “Casper’s style”.

Often what appears to be enthusiasm for a certain visual aesthetic is actually the result of enthusiasm for a certain set of processes, like an interest in analogue tools or digital modelling. The way and the why behind creation vastly vary from person to person: some creatives are driven by an obsession with formal experimentation, and use their work as a place to push boundaries around mark-making, while others are passionate about a certain subject area — food, sports, fashion — and create work primarily as a way to participate in that culture. Others are language and concept-driven first, and value formal qualities primarily for their ability to convey a certain message; the use of any particular forms or visual tropes are simply means to an end. In all cases, a creative’s work and the perceived “style” it typifies are simply the unified product of a person’s taste, ideas and craft; style is bottom-up, not top-down. Designers don’t adopt visual aesthetics for their surface appeal. Rather, their surface appeal reflects the deep personal meanings hiding just beneath the surface.

While many would credit Robert for his revival and popularisation of a certain style of kitsch airbrush art, he explains that he was drawn to the hallucinatory style less for its actual look and more because it “lent itself well to the grotesque” — a subject area he’s always been fascinated by. Other eclectic elements you see in his art, like bubble letters and neon text, stem from things like soap opera magazines and candy packaging from his childhood, as well as his appreciation for what he describes as “epic prog fantasy stuff” like Roger Dean’s artwork for the band Yes (Robert notes he got into Yes in 2001, when it was still “deeply uncool”). The incorporation of these elements into his work is implicit and completely organic: reflective of his personal history and wide-ranging interests in all sorts of high and low culture. Those who adopt these elements without this fundamental appreciation miss the essence of what made them compelling in the first place. “If you take away the grotesque subject matter, it risks just being corporate art,” says Robert.

Personal style is a bit like a fossil — a tangible record of the collaborations, influences and cultural experiences that have shaped a designer over time. Braulio Amado, a popular Portuguese designer and illustrator, lists off a range of experiences and collaborations that impacted his style, from his time at Bloomberg Businessweek with Tracy Ma and Chris Nosenzo to a college friend’s boyfriend who made cool work for a class project that challenged students to create from limited resources (a class he credits with his habit of bringing references from the real world into his work). “I didn’t invent this stuff on my own,” he says. “It comes from working with other people and accommodating each other’s ways of working. It’s a community effort.” Jen Mussari highlights a similar phenomenon within sign-painting, where the lineage of mentorship is visible in the strokes of letters themselves. “You can tell who trained with who based on how they draw their alphabet,” she says. “It’s a visual lineage.”

Style without context always risks falling into the uncanny valley — as styles are removed from their origins and mass produced, they become unmoored from the contexts that gave them meaning, leading to a cultural and personal disconnection. If a style born from the underground music scene or a specific social movement is adopted broadly in corporate advertising, does it retain any of its original rebellious spirit or cultural significance through aesthetics alone? I don’t think it does; looking punk is meaningless if you’re not actually rebelling against anything. While many designers intentionally or unintentionally borrow motifs in their quest to own a distinctive style — believing that a recognisable set of aesthetics in their portfolio is the key to industry success — in actuality, style isn’t always something you choose; most of the time, like taste, it finds you.

As designers see their personal styles co-opted and popularised, many experience a critical transformation in their identities: from creator to curator of their own aesthetic. In such cases, the designer’s task evolves from creating individual pieces of work into managing expansive collaborations where their signature style is replicated on a mass scale. This kind of artist-as-director model is more similar to the practice of fine artists like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst — who manage teams that produce artworks under their oversight — rather than the typical independent working designer. This shift to a more strategic role may also manifest in the form of an artist’s decisions about which opportunities to accept and which to decline in order to prevent dilution or misrepresentation of their work. Writ large, this reflects a broader industry trend in which unique artistic contributions are commodified to the extent that the original artist becomes just one of many providers of a particular aesthetic. In such an environment, the distinctive style of a creative becomes no more than a commodity traded and replicated across various platforms and products, often without substantial recognition of the original creator’s contribution and original intent.

This shift from making to overseeing is nowhere more true than in the use of AI image generators — or, as anthropologist Julien Posture calls them, illustration without illustrators. These technologies can generate artwork in the style of any given artist with startling accuracy, further complicating the dynamics of artistic creation and ownership and exacerbating the issue of style replication without the initial artist’s involvement on a scale previously unimaginable. While illustrators see style as a rich, complex category deeply intertwined with personal experiences, AI approaches style as a set of mathematical vectors that can be isolated and manipulated. Some oft-mimicked artists have found a way to take advantage of the popularity of their styles with AI generators; Google Labs recently worked directly with four creatives — Shawna X, Erik Carter, Haruko Hayakawa and Eric Hu — to fine-tune AI algorithms that replicate their distinctive styles to illustrate Alice in Wonderland (famously a public domain work). By engaging directly with technological reproductions of their work, these artists acknowledge the transition of their creative output beyond their direct control, and have chosen to guide its replication instead — ensuring the integrity of AI-generated works bearing their aesthetic signature (hopefully with a hefty paycheck attached for ceding exclusive ownership over their characteristic style!)

Other artists haven’t been so lucky. Illustrator Tomer Hanuka, for example, has been vocal about the rampant copying of his style by AI tools like Midjourney, and the ways in which this dissemination of his style has impeded his “cultural capital”. Hanuka said to Art in America that the hurt “goes deeper than run-of-the-mill online theft” because it’s much more personal. “You develop this language that can work with many different projects because you bring something from yourself into the equation, a piece of your soul that somehow finds an angle, an atmosphere. And then this [AI-generated art] comes along. It’s passable, it sells. It doesn’t just replace you but it also muddies what you’re trying to do, which is to make art, find beauty. It’s really the opposite of that.” Other artists, like Greg Rutkowski, have styles that have been ripped by AI artists so frequently (literally, more than Picasso) that their entire personal style is now irrevocably associated with the tropes of AI art.

In previous eras, the development of a personal style was often a private endeavour, undertaken in the solitude of a studio or through quiet study and experimentation. Artists and designers would learn by making copies of masterworks, a practice intended to develop skill and understanding, not to produce pieces to populate a portfolio. These exercises were confined to sketchbooks and personal studies, never meant for public display or recognition. Social media has transformed this landscape. The immediacy and visibility afforded by online platforms mean that even early and experimental works can be shared widely, sometimes without context. This shift not only accelerates the exposure and adoption of personal styles but also muddies the waters of origin and ownership. It is not uncommon now for less experienced designers to replicate contemporary styles they see online, posting them as their own without the traditional groundwork of private study and development, leading to a culture where the lines between inspiration, imitation and outright copying are increasingly blurred.

Some creatives seem to mistakenly believe that simply emulating the outward appearance of a successful style will grant them the same cultural relevance, visibility or career advancement as others who have found success working in that style — a particularly pervasive belief at a time when digital platforms highlight and amplify only the most algorithmically favoured designs. David Rudnick argues that when designers copy a style, it’s driven by a subconscious desire to replicate the emotional impact that the work had on them; by reproducing what visually resonated with them, they hope to evoke similar feelings of awe or connection in others. He likens this to a form of “sympathetic magic”, a term drawn from anthropological discourse that describes the belief that imitating an action or appearance allows one to harness the same power associated with it (almost like a reverse voodoo doll). However, he cautions that if you replicate the form without understanding why that form exists, “you end up with something that looks the same but lacks soul.”