I’m finding the way we talk about originality exhausting. We are constantly looking for the next thing: the new designer, the new sound, the new aesthetic, the new restaurant, the new way of saying something that has probably already been said in another form. Everything seems to come with the expectation that it should feel unprecedented. We want to be surprised, but we also want to be able to say that we saw it first. And somewhere in between those two things, we have started to treat originality as if it were the highest form of creativity. But I have been wondering whether originality, at least in the way we usually understand it, really exists.
Think about the last time something caught your attention. Maybe it was a photograph, a song, a film, a dress, a piece of furniture, or even the way someone had arranged their apartment. Chances are, it reminded you of something. Sometimes the connection is immediate and you can actually name it. Other times, it is harder to explain. You just recognize something in it. It feels familiar without being exactly familiar. That instinct to compare new things to old things is not necessarily a limitation. It is actually how we understand the world around us.
When we encounter something completely unfamiliar, we look for a point of reference. We compare it to what we already know so that we can make sense of it. A new idea becomes easier to understand when we can place it next to an older one. A new film can be described as “somewhere between” two other films. A new designer is inevitably discussed through the designers who came before them. Even when we insist that something is entirely new, our first instinct is often to explain it through something that already exists.
The same thing happens when we create. None of us begins with an empty page in the most literal sense. By the time we decide to make something, we have already spent years collecting references without necessarily realizing that we were collecting them. The books we read, the movies we watched repeatedly as children, the clothes our parents wore, the cities we have lived in, the people we have met, the conversations that stayed with us, the photographs we saved, the songs we played until we got tired of them. Some influences are intentional. Others are almost invisible. They sit somewhere in the back of our minds and eventually find their way into whatever we are making.
This is more obvious in fashion and culture, where the past is constantly being brought back into the present. Trends return, silhouettes are reinterpreted, old films become references for new ones, and decades that were once considered dated suddenly become desirable again. We call it nostalgia, revival, or even reinvention, but the basic mechanism remains the same: we take something that already exists and find another way of looking at it. That does not necessarily make it less creative.
We have been taught to think of copying as the opposite of creating. To copy something is to imitate it too closely; to create something is supposedly to produce something that did not exist before. But this is not how creative work is actually made. Writers read other writers. Directors watch films. Designers look at clothes. Musicians listen to other musicians. Artists study other artists. Nobody creates without looking.
The interesting question, then, is not whether we are influenced by other people. We are. The interesting question is what happens to those influences once they pass through us.
Two people can be inspired by exactly the same things and produce completely different results. They can love the same movie, the same decade, the same designer, the same book, and still have completely different ways of translating those references. Their influences might overlap, but their lives do not. One person brings their childhood into the work; another brings their sense of humour. Someone else brings a particular city, a relationship, a memory, or simply a different way of seeing things. The references may be familiar, but the combination is personal.
THAT is what makes something feel original in the first place. Not the fact that it has never existed before, but the fact that we have never seen those particular things put together in quite that way.
This is why I find the pressure to have an entirely original voice so strange. We are expected to develop a personal aesthetic, a recognizable point of view, something that immediately belongs to us. But how are we supposed to discover that voice if we are constantly trying to separate ourselves from everyone who influenced us? It seems much more natural to do the opposite: to look closely at the things we love and understand what it is about them that stays with us.
Yohji Yamamoto once said, “Copy copy copy what you love, at the end of the copy you will find yourself.” I like the contradiction in that idea.
We usually think of copying as something we should eventually stop doing, as if creativity begins only once we have successfully removed every trace of our references. But perhaps, what Yohji was trying to tell us is that copying can be a form of learning: You imitate something because you are trying to understand it. You repeat it until you understand what works and what does not. Then you change it. You combine it with something else. You make a mistake. You try again. Eventually, what began as imitation starts becoming interpretation, and somewhere in that process, your own voice begins to appear.
The things we borrow say something about what we are drawn to. Even the things we reject can become part of our perspective. Our taste is essentially an accumulation of decisions: what we kept looking at, what we stopped looking at, what stayed with us, and what we eventually decided to make our own.
I find relief in the fact that none of this starts with us, we just must admit that to ourselves. It takes away the pressure of having to invent something completely new every time we sit down to write, design, photograph, direct, or simply put together an outfit. We can look backwards without feeling that we are moving backwards. We can acknowledge our references instead of pretending they do not exist.
The idea that everything is a remix does not make creativity less special. If anything, it makes it more interesting, more nuanced. There are only so many colours, shapes, words, sounds, stories, and ideas in the world, but there are almost infinite ways of combining them. The possibility does not come from having an endless supply of completely new material. It comes from what happens when familiar things meet in an unfamiliar way.
Originality may not be about creating something from nothing. It may simply be about creating something that could only have been made through your particular combination of influences, experiences, obsessions, and memories. We are all borrowing. We are all referencing. We are all remixing.
There is no reason to be embarrassed by the things we copy, especially when we copy because we love them. Look at what you love. Look at it again. Borrow from it. Take it apart. Put it next to something completely different. Let it influence you. Eventually, without even realizing it, you will start making something that sounds a little more like yourself.
Everything is a remix. The point was never to be completely original. The point was to make the remix yours.
Image credit: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis; ‘Alfred Hitchcock directing Janet Leigh on the set of Psycho‘,1960