What the law actually says for designers plagiarised by brands
A guide to IP, portfolios, and why legal protection in fashion rarely works the way designers expect.
By Jorinde Croese
In an article published the other day, we spoke with a handful of designers about a very specific frustration: ideas shared during interviews, portfolio reviews or collaboration pitches later reappearing inside major collections. This raises an obvious question: what does the law actually offer fashion designers in these situations?
The industry shorthand answer – that fashion is essentially unprotected – is only partly true. As Tania Phipps-Rufus, lawyer and Course Leader BA Fashion Cultures and Business at the University of East London, explains below, the legal reality is more layered, more technical, and more conditional than most designers are ever taught. There are protections, particularly around unregistered design rights, copyright and breach of confidence. But turning those rights into meaningful outcomes requires evidence, timing, resources, and strategic choices that are often out of reach for emerging designers.
So, here’s a clear-eyed explanation of how intellectual property law actually operates in practice, and how it aligns (and fails to align) with the lived realities designers described in our previous piece.
How does IP law actually apply to fashion design in practice?
If we strip away the acronyms, what intellectual property law offers fashion is not a single, bespoke “fashion right”, but a stack of overlapping protections that attach to different aspects of a collection. The cut and construction of garments, their overall look, prints and graphics, and the brand identifiers that sit on top of all of that. From a practical perspective, the most important part of that stack for fashion is design law. Post-Brexit, Community designs no longer extend to the UK, and the landscape has been reconfigured. A single garment or accessory may now be covered, simultaneously or sequentially, by several different rights. In practical terms, most UK-based designers will encounter three main forms of protection:
UK Unregistered Design Right (UKUDR) – automatic protection for the shape and structure of a product (how it’s cut and put together, not the print or colour).
Supplementary Unregistered Design (SUD) – an automatic, post-Brexit right that protects the overall look of a product, including surface decoration, for three years from first UK disclosure.
UK Registered Design (UKRD) – a registered right, lasting up to 25 years if renewed, that protects the appearance of the whole or part of a product (lines, contours, colours, texture, ornamentation).
Then, alongside these design-specific rights, copyright may also apply where a work qualifies as an “artistic work” – typically fabric prints, graphics, textile designs and, more exceptionally, very sculptural garments or accessories. Trade mark law sits alongside this, mainly protecting brand signifiers – logos, names and distinctive recurring signatures – rather than the cut of a particular dress. What matters in practice for designers here, particularly emerging ones, is that unregistered rights arise automatically. No filing is required for UKUDR or SUD, and SUD in particular maps relatively well onto fashion’s tempo it might be argued, as it protects the look of a design from first disclosure and then falls away after three years, which is roughly the commercial life of many seasonal products. That is a genuine practical advantage for emerging designers who cannot afford to register every piece.
However, there are real drawbacks. SUD’s three-year term is short, especially for designs that build slowly or become commercially important over time; it does not reflect the longer life cycle of “signature” products that remain relevant beyond a single season. And unlike registered designs, where liability is essentially strict once validity is established, unregistered rights require you to prove copying. In other words, it is not enough that a high-street piece looks similar – you must persuade a court that the defendant actually took their design from yours. UK unregistered design right can run for up to 15 years from creation, but in practice it is usually around ten from first marketing. The key distinction, which often surprises designers, is that UKUDR is structurally focused – it ignores colour and surface decoration. By contrast, SUD protects the overall visual impression of the product, which is much more helpful for fashion design, where what matters in practice is how something looks as a whole rather than purely how it is constructed.
So in practice, IP law does offer multiple avenues of protection for fashion design, but designers often experience it as fragmented and opaque. It tends to work best for those who understand that a mix of automatic unregistered rights, selective use of registration, and solid records of creation, ownership and first disclosure is what turns the theory of IP into something they can actually use in the real world.
For designers showing in multiple markets, territoriality also matters. First disclosure in Paris or online to an EU-facing audience may favour EU unregistered design protection at the expense of UK SUD, whereas a London-centred launch does the reverse. Strategic choices about where and how a collection is first shown now have IP consequences, even for unregistered rights. For designers working between London, the continent and other markets such as the US, there are parallel IP regimes in each territory, and the key point to grasp is that these rights are territorial in nature: protection in the UK does not automatically translate into protection in the EU or the US, and vice versa. Designers should think quite consciously about where they are doing business and where they first launch a collection, because those choices can affect which rights arise automatically, where they need to register, and where they can actually be enforced. In an ideal world, your IP strategy would mirror your business strategy: you start from where you plan to show, sell and manufacture your work, and then build legal protection around those markets gradually, rather than scrambling to retrofit rights once problems arise.
In practice, however, the real constraint for many emerging designers is not the absence of rights on paper, but the cost and complexity of enforcing them against better-resourced opponents. The designers who are most effectively protected tend to be those who combine this layered IP framework with disciplined record-keeping and carefully targeted enforcement: keeping dated design records, thinking deliberately about where and when they first show a collection, and being selective about which key pieces are worth the additional expense of registration.
What are the realistic steps designers can take to protect themselves, and what common pitfalls do you see?