Do luxury brands lift ideas from interview portfolios?
Why claims of idea theft are so hard to prove, and why they keep circulating anyway.
By Jorinde Croese
*Names have been changed on request for anonymity, with the exception of Daria y Maria.
When Zifa* opened her portfolio during a job interview with a fashion house, she had no reason to suspect what would follow. The team had asked her and her partner Gerard* to sketch “a vision” for the brand’s future – a speculative proposal that was framed as part of the application process. They delivered what was asked of them. Six months later, after a new creative director was appointed, elements of that vision appeared on the runway. After submitting the work, they never heard back from the brand. No explanation, no rejection, no acknowledgement.
Whether this constituted copying is impossible to verify from the outside. This particular type of garment (a bra with a specific design detail) has appeared throughout fashion history, and creative directors often work from extensive house archives. What Zifa experienced as appropriation may have been coincidence, convergent thinking, or a design that predated her interview entirely. But the lack of communication left her with no way to know.
Stories like this circulate freely among fashion graduates, passed between peers as warnings. While major brands present themselves as arbiters of creativity and innovation, they also rely on a steady inflow of new ideas from emerging designers – ideas that sometimes arrive through job applications, internship interviews, and unsolicited pitches.
This practice exists in a legal and procedural grey zone. Fashion’s weak intellectual property protections, combined with steep power imbalances between institutions and individuals, make it almost impossible to contest. Yet the persistence of these stories reveals something more complex than a simple narrative of institutional theft. Sometimes designers are right. Sometimes they overestimate the originality of their work. And sometimes the copying, when it does occur, happens not at the executive level but through junior designers – recent graduates themselves – who bring references from their own education into the studio.
Early next week, we will publish a separate Q&A with Tania Phipps-Rufus, lawyer and Course Leader BA Fashion Cultures and Business at the University of East London, examining what intellectual property law can (and cannot) offer designers in these situations, the limited forms of legal recourse available, and the practical steps creatives can take to protect themselves. But the persistence of these stories suggests that the problem cannot be solved by law alone.
“I didn’t feel comfortable contacting HR or the head designer directly, because this industry is small and unfortunately actions like that can close future doors and opportunities,”
A pattern that repeats, or seems to
The mechanics of this extraction are remarkably consistent, at least as designers describe them. Designers are encouraged (explicitly or implicitly) to share their process in order to demonstrate seriousness, rigour, and employability. Portfolios are submitted through official portals, interviews reward openness, and pitches rely on trust. The expectation is that this material will be used only to assess suitability. Instead, some designers describe the following pattern: initial enthusiasm, followed by silence or rejection, and then recognition – delayed, public, and out of their control.
Roberta*, a graduate of Central Saint Martins, experienced this across multiple applications. In June and July 2021, shortly after completing her BA at London College of Fashion, she applied to two positions at a major British luxury house. Her portfolio documented a distinctive approach to corded textile experimentation, including precise measurements: six 1cm cords wrapped across the bust and shoulders, and 0.5cm cotton cords used on sleeves and structural details. The techniques were explained in depth, down to stitching methods and placement.