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It's not so much that Ayu was seen as a ripoff of Tomomi Kahala - she was actually specifically sorta "designed" as Max Matsuura's Tomomi Kahala counterpart (since TK was produced by & associated with TK... yup, even her stage name was chosen to match his initials). So TK had TK, Max was gonna have Ayu, and Ayu's image was intended to be sorta appeal to people who liked Tomomi, but didn't want yet another TK family member.
Anyway, it wasn't that people saw through that, it was that right around the time of Ayu's debut, AFTER she had been all groomed & her sound and look had been developed, the media went nuts with the scandal about TK and Tomomi having an affair and doing drugs together.... Tetsuya Komuro had to work for the next couple of years to sorta fix his image, and he was powerful enough that he was alright by like 2001, but Tomomi never recovered really. She seemed to be getting there, and then after Keiko Fujii died she made a really awkward comment about wanting to make a song about it which was just kinda like.... eehhh, no.
ANYWAY, back on topic... "Trust" was Ayu's first top 10 single, and interviews often brought up how her popularity was growing because of its use in an AUBE commercial. She made her hair wavy after she turned 20 (which began more steady appearances as a fashion/makeup example in magazines), so like.... she finally had her own identity as a pop star, but part of that identity was that she came across as stupid. TV & radio talk show hosts would make fun of her being kind of spacy and referring to herself in the third person. Meanwhile she'd frustratedly explain that the album title "A Song for XX" was pronounced "ee songu foo" and not "ah songu foo daburu ekkusu", and the title actually MEANT something, but she was treated rather dismissively and even ignored by the hosts when she did that. You could tell she was trying to go for the "I want fans/listeners to relate to this stuff, fill in the blanks themselves" thing but it was like anyone who interviewed her couldn't be arsed to care.
So the real turning point was probably when the A Song for XX TV commercials started playing - the lyrics to "A Song for XX" and "POWDER SNOW" that people heard in those ads were, well... dark as fxxk. At least compared to what TK's pop princesses were singing about back then. Ayu's lyrics were certainly honest on the singles before the album came out, but they weren't anywhere near the stark contrast to the stuff on the charts that "A Song for XX" and "POWDER SNOW" were. These were wintry, dark, unusual, raw songs, so Ayu's reputation as being the pop singer that every teenager (especially girls) could relate to was thanks in no small part to those ads, and the promotion for the album.
As a way of further distancing Ayu from her image as an alternative to TK, Max instead decided to cement her as "Max Matsuura's artist" by giving her more of a dance sound - plans for ayu-mi-x began well in advance of A Song for XX's release, WHATEVER was released with a remix as the lead track (and the promotion of versions M and J, no doubt, served as a pretty good marketing experiment to see what audiences responded better to), et cetera. Ayu had her own pull to that push as well of course - her insistence that ayu-mi-x have an Acoustic Orchestra disc was no secret and probably helped begin her reputation for being so in control of her own career and image.
So by mid-1999 you've got this pop star who's at one time a poet, a CEO, and a girl-next-door. She gave voice to all the anxieties, fears, ambitions, and hopes every high school girl had at the time. The result was that by the time the Trilogy was released in Spring 2000, everyone wanted to look like her - big sunglasses, long wavy blond hair, jewels around the eyes, peacoats, high collars, bangs... so much of her style was copied after early 2000.
So it's easy to say it was Ayu's style that MADE her popular, but it wasn't that alone... her more unassumingly tomboyish, mature-and-yet-girly sense of style was very individual to "her," you know? That could have backfired terribly. But people responded to who she was & what she was saying far more than they ever responded to any particularly tailored "look" she had. So the style followed.
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