The Devil Wears Law to Protect the Label: How Fashion Became an Asset Class.

Does a silhouette belong to the artisan who birthed it, or the empire that scaled it? Behind the flawless contour of a global trend lies a silver needle — not just of thread, but of law stitching the boundary between inspiration and theft. In a world where a centuries-old heritage can be translated into a luxury commodity overnight, a roll of fabric is no longer just a material; it is a contested territory.

The Three Pillars of Protection

• Trademarks (The Brand’s DNA): This is the most potent tool for fashion houses. Beyond just a name, trademarks protect logos, signature hardware, and distinctive motifs.¹
• Copyright (The Artistic Soul): While functional clothing (like the basic cut of a shirt) usually is not copyrightable, the original artistry on it is. This covers unique textile prints, intricate lace patterns, and custom illustrations. If a competitor clones your hand-painted floral print, copyright is your primary weapon.²
• Design Patents (The Ornamental Blueprint): Reserved for truly novel and non-functional visual characteristics, design patents offer high-level protection for a fixed term — up to 15 years under Indian law. They are the heavy hitters used to protect innovative silhouettes or hardware that have not previously appeared in the industry.³

These three pillars, however, only protect what the law can recognise. The more difficult question is what happens when a design falls outside their reach — or when a global brand deliberately engineers around them.

Did you know that a “new” luxury sandal sold by Prada for ₹1.2 lakh was actually a design perfected centuries ago in the heart of Maharashtra?

When Prada launched its leather toe-ring sandals in late 2025, the fashion world called it a “minimalist masterpiece.”⁴ But in India, the response was altogether different: the design was widely compared in Indian media and public discourse to the traditional Kolhapuri chappal. This was not merely a style clash; it was a legal loophole in action.

Because the Kolhapuri chappal is protected by a Geographical Indication (GI) tag,⁵ only local artisans should technically profit from the name. Prada, however, played a careful game: they retained the contour and fabric style but never used the word “Kolhapuri” in their advertising. By stripping the name, they bypassed Indian GI laws and marketed the product at a substantially higher luxury retail price than comparable artisan-made footwear.

The cultural dimension did not stop there. In early 2026, Prada released Infusion de Santal Chai, a perfume that bottled the scent of India’s daily staple and sold it for ₹17,000. These twin controversies forced a significant shift in how the industry views Fashion Law. Today, following public and legal pressure, Prada has moved toward formal Memorandums of Understanding with Indian state craft bodies. It is a powerful lesson: in an age of global awareness, inspiration without compensation is no longer a sustainable business model.

This legal interplay between shape and signature raises a key question: can a silhouette itself acquire iconic trademark status?

In late 2025, the Delhi High Court delivered a landmark victory for Hermès,⁶ ruling that the Birkin bag is officially a “Well-Known Trademark” in India. This was not about a fake logo — it was about the bag’s anatomy. The court held that the specific contour, flap, and lock system are so iconic that the shape alone functions as a brand identifier. Even without the “Hermès” tag, any bag mimicking this silhouette is now legally considered an infringement.

Between Culture and Couture

For centuries, South Asian textiles have shaped global fashion in ways the world has noticed but never truly acknowledged.

Beyond the Silhouette: The “Scandinavian” Scarf Scandal

The erasure of identity often begins with a simple name change. In 2024 and throughout 2025, social media was flooded with the “Scandinavian Scarf” trend — a chic, European way of draping long, flowing fabric over the shoulders. The global South Asian community, however, quickly identified this new European accessory for what it truly was: the Dupatta.

This rebranding is more than a marketing error; it is a form of intellectual erasure. By labelling a 3,000-year-old Indian garment as “Scandinavian,” brands strip away the cultural context, the weaver’s craftsmanship, and the historical weight of the piece to make it trend-worthy for a Western consumer. Legally, this falls into a grey area — you cannot copyright “a long piece of fabric” — but it highlights a critical failure in our current IP systems.

The Scandinavian scarf trend is just a recent chapter in a long history of erasing South Asian textile heritage. Below are further examples of textiles that were exported and rebranded in the West.

• Madras Checks: Originating in South India, Madras checks were traditionally woven in red, green, and blue with natural dyes like turmeric. They were later adopted by the West as a symbol of Ivy League status. The 1950s “Bleeding Madras” campaign turned a technical flaw in fading natural dyes into a luxury “guaranteed to bleed” trademark. Today, it remains a cautionary tale of intellectual erasure — a community’s heritage taken and sold back to the world as a billionaire’s “vintage discovery.”⁷
• Kalamkari: Traditionally practised in Andhra Pradesh using bamboo pens and vegetable dyes, Kalamkari faced a modern legal crisis when its intricate hand-painted motifs began appearing on mass-produced, printed fabrics worldwide. While its GI status protects the name, it often fails to stop fast-fashion brands from stripping its signature mythological patterns for digital prints.⁸
• Paisley: The original Persian Butta — a symbol of life and eternity — is found across the Kanchipuram Sari, Chikankari, Zardozi, and Kashmiri shawls. It was a hallmark of Mughal and Persian royalty. By the 19th century, Paisley had become the symbol of Bohemian chic in the West, worn by countercultural icons like the Beatles.⁹
• Thalis: Japanese brand Puebco has rebranded traditional Indian thalis as a fashionable “Indian souvenir bag,” sold in high-end global stores at $48.¹⁰
• Sheesha Embroidery: Tory Burch released a line of “mirror dresses” that draws from India’s centuries-old Sheesha embroidery tradition.¹¹

In the blur between appreciation and appropriation, do the real artisans — whose hands carry forward history and identity — ever get the credit?

The Need for Fashion Law

Strong intellectual property rights are not a bureaucratic formality; they are the primary mechanism through which cultural heritage and economic independence are defended. For centuries, the West has treated South Asian craftsmanship as a free-access library. Without copyright or patent protection, global brands have been free to erase our cultural identity and profit from it. Claiming IP rights means establishing ourselves as the legal custodians of our own heritage — not as unnamed sources of “inspiration.” We need to stop treating our traditions as a global commons and start defending them as valuable intellectual property, securing both credit and capital for their original creators.

Fashion law also serves the commercial backbone of the industry. It is the legal architecture that protects designers and artisans against the “copycat economy” of fast fashion, which can duplicate a runway look within days. The Designs Act and Trademark law together shield designers from counterfeiting — the production of lookalike goods that dilute the value of original work. Beyond commerce, fashion law has become an instrument of cultural preservation, with GI tags used to defend traditional weaves and artisanal heritage against machine-made replicas that seek the prestige of genuine handcraft.

Today, fashion law must also respond to sustainability and the digital frontier. Regulators are increasingly requiring brands to substantiate environmental claims and disclose supply chain practices. And as the metaverse and AI-driven design tools reshape creative production, lawyers are actively developing new frameworks for digital ownership and virtual asset protection. Fashion law, at its best, holds in balance the ethical duty to protect heritage with the commercial imperative to enable growth — safeguarding the rights of every person from production floor to online storefront.

Artificial Intelligence and the New Frontier of Intellectual Property

Beyond textiles and trademarks, fashion law now faces its most complex challenge yet: the rise of generative artificial intelligence.

AI has fundamentally disrupted the norms governing who owns creative work and who may reproduce it. The legal system, built for human authorship, struggles to keep pace with algorithms that produce designs in seconds. Every output generated by a system “trained” on existing work enters a legal grey area: is it an innovative outcome, or a sophisticated form of digital theft? The challenge is compounded by the fact that AI-generated designs must simultaneously avoid reproducing training data while still demonstrating originality — a standard the law has not yet codified. The question of whether human intervention in an AI-drafted design constitutes original authorship remains unresolved.

The problem deepens because training datasets operate as “black boxes” — their contents opaque even to the companies deploying them. This opacity creates genuine ethical exposure: a machine may unknowingly reproduce protected cultural elements without any human being aware of the infringement. We have entered an era in which the very speed and opacity of AI creation outstrips the intellectual property frameworks designed to govern it.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the intersection of fashion and law has evolved far beyond conventional trademark disputes or counterfeit litigation. It now represents a broader contest over authorship, ownership, and the legal meaning of creativity itself. While traditional mechanisms — trademarks, design protection, and Geographical Indications — continue to safeguard the tangible and cultural identity of fashion, generative artificial intelligence has introduced an entirely new frontier, one in which the line between inspiration, imitation, and innovation grows increasingly difficult to define.

To remain relevant, legal frameworks must evolve alongside creative industries, recognising not only commercial value but also cultural authorship, ethical accountability, and the rights attached to human creativity. The future of fashion will not be shaped solely by design studios or runways, but by how law chooses to define ownership in an age where legacy can be replicated in seconds.

Bibliography

Legislation

• Copyright Act 1957 (India)
• Designs Act 2000 (India)
• Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act 1999 (India)
• Trade Marks Act 1999 (India)

Case Law

• Hermès International & Anr v Macky Lifestyle Pvt Ltd & Anr 2025 DHC 10346 (Delhi High Court, 24 November 2025)

Web and Industry Sources

• Business of Fashion, articles on cultural appropriation and luxury branding (2024–26)
• Vogue, reports on fashion trends and luxury brand commentary (2024–26)
• The Fashion Law, articles on intellectual property and fashion disputes (2024–26)
• World Intellectual Property Organization, reports on Artificial Intelligence and Copyright (2024–26)
• Government of India, Geographical Indications Registry, “Kolhapuri Chappal” Registration Records
• Government of India, Geographical Indications Registry, “Kalamkari” Registration Details
• Puebco product catalogue listings
• Textile history archives on Madras checks and the “Bleeding Madras” campaign
• Historical textile scholarship on the Persian Buta motif and its adoption into Western fashion history
• Tory Burch collection commentary referencing mirror-work inspired garments

Book

Guillermo C Jimenez and Barbara Kolsun, Fashion Law: A Guide for Designers, Fashion Executives and Attorneys

¹ Trade Marks Act 1999 (India), ss 2(zb), 9, 11.

² Copyright Act 1957 (India), ss 13–14.

³ Designs Act 2000 (India), s 11. Note: the initial term is 10 years, extendable by a further 5 years, for a maximum of 15 years.

⁴ Prada product campaign reports discussed in The Business of Fashion and Vogue (2025).

⁵ Geographical Indications Registry, “Kolhapuri Chappal” (Registered GI Tag), Government of India.

⁶ Hermès International & Anr v Macky Lifestyle Pvt Ltd & Anr 2025 DHC 10346 (Delhi High Court, 24 November 2025); Trade Marks Act 1999, s 11(6).

⁷ Textile history archives on Madras checks and the “Bleeding Madras” campaign.

⁸ Geographical Indications Registry, “Kalamkari” Registration Details, Government of India.

⁹ Historical textile scholarship on the Persian Buta motif and its adoption into Western fashion history.

¹⁰ Puebco product catalogue listings.

¹¹ Tory Burch collection commentary referencing mirror-work inspired garments.