The guitar community has recently been engaged in the age-old tradition of arguing on the internet over whether Fender is right to protect its iconic Stratocaster guitar design, or whether decades of ubiquity have made the shape as much a part of guitar culture as it is a Fender product.

Now, you may be wondering, why a guitar designed in the 1950s is the topic of internet discourse in 2026, and how Fender is attempting to protect their intellectual property rights now, when every second guitar brand has been selling lookalike Stratocasters for almost as long as Fender has been selling the original.

If I asked you to imagine an electric guitar, I don’t need to be a psychic to guess that the image your mind’s eye conjured up, looks something like this:

This was however not always the case. The first electric guitar was created in the 1930s and was colloquially known as “The Frying Pan”, which was descriptive of its banjo-like shape. This new technology was incorporated into the more traditional hollow-body guitars of the time, and in the 1940s, Les Paul mounted pickups on a solid block of pine, bringing us closer to the electric guitars we know today.

In the early 1950s, Leo Fender and his team of luthiers set out to revolutionise the electric guitar. Following years of experimentation, alterations, scrapped drafts and tests, the Stratocaster was created and released in 1954. The Stratocaster was groundbreaking for a number of reasons, including (for the guitar-nerds amongst us) its double-cutaway design (which gives it its iconic look), three single-coil pickups and synchronised vibrato.

Despite its introduction coinciding with the boom of rock-n-roll in the mid-1950s, the Stratocaster got off to a slow start, with most musicians at the time seeing it as a “gimmick”. That was until Buddy Holly plugged in a Stratocaster and introduced it to millions of television viewers in 1957. Few musicians did more to popularise both rock-n-roll and Fender's revolutionary guitar. By the close of the decade, the Stratocaster had cemented itself as a rock-'n-roll staple.

Over the years, many other legends of the craft have picked Stratocasters as their axes of choice, including Jimi Hendrix (who played it upside down) and Eric Clapton. Today, over 70 years after its initial release, the word “electric guitar” is still synonymous with the Stratocaster, such that the guitar emoji on most operating systems is based on its design