From a business perspective, big cake trends help cake decorators sell their goods and make money. If customers are asking for it, why wouldn’ t you want to take advantage? Replicating an on-trend cake can help boost engagement in your business and keep you relevant.
But this is where it gets a bit murky for me … There’ s a difference between participating in a trend and replicating someone’ s specific design, detail for detail.
With social media, cakes can go viral overnight. After enough repetition, the design trend starts to feel like it belongs to the cake community, rather than the individual who first conceptualised it. In reality, the original creator isn’ t( usually) credited and I don’ t think many of us could name the artist behind many of the cake trends over the past few years.
So at what point does a design stop belonging to the person who created it? Is that just the natural progression of art evolution, or does it erase the work of the original artist?
I don’ t think any of us wake up with the intention to steal someone else ' s work. We recreate cake designs because we admire it, we want to learn something new and we also know they’ ll perform well on social media.
So where do we draw the line? Trends will always exist as part of the creative cycle, but originality is what starts them. That’ s what( I think) we need to preserve.