Why won’t brands credit their in-house designers?

You can't build a career on work no one knows you did.

By Olya Kuryshchuk

A few years ago, we started doing recruitment at 1 Granary. It gave us insights into how profoundly unjust fashion’s system of invisibility is compared with other creative industries.

I remember the day the news broke that Seán McGirr was joining McQueen. Before the announcement even hit the press, senior designers started reaching out to me. Designers with twenty years of experience and CVs far more impressive than his. They weren’t questioning the choice. They were asking a simpler question: how does anyone even get into the room for these jobs? They hadn’t known the position was open. No recruiter had reached out. They’d spent decades in the industry, yet the process had been completely opaque to them.

The industry of invisibility

This problem starts with a lack of recognition. Compare it to the film industry. When a movie ends, the credits roll. Hundreds of names scroll past: director, cinematographer, editor, costume designer, gaffer, grip, caterer. The list is exhaustive because the industry understands movies are made by teams, and those teams deserve to be named. The Academy explicitly frames film as collaborative art; credits are the record of that collaboration.

The same applies to music. Everyone who makes a creative contribution is named: songwriters, producers, engineers, session musicians. Their roles are publicly listed, tracked through royalty systems, and tied directly to career progression. The Grammys extend recognition across categories because the industry acknowledges that a recording is never the work of one person.

Architecture practices publish multi-line team credits as a matter of good professional conduct. Academic research has strict authorship guidelines; misattribution is considered an ethical violation serious enough to end careers.

Fashion collections are built by teams of twenty, fifty, sometimes more than a hundred people: knitwear designers, textile developers, creative pattern cutters, print designers, embroiderers, each bringing years of expertise to problems that

cannot be solved by a single mind.

Yet, the myth of the lone genius is one of the industry’s most persistent fictions. We are told that collections emerge from singular visionaries touched by inspiration. Everyone else becomes “support,” “assistants,” or “the studio.” As if the people who design garments, develop fabrics, and solve the infinite technical problems of making ideas wearable are peripheral rather than central to creativity.

Manufactured geniuses

Researchers have spent decades dismantling the genius myth. Keith Sawyer’s work on innovation shows that new ideas rarely emerge from single minds; they arise from collaboration – the friction of differing viewpoints, the back-and-forth of conversation, the slow accumulation of ideas refined by many hands. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argued that creativity doesn’t reside inside individuals at all but in the interaction between people, knowledge, and context. No one creates in a vacuum.

Artists themselves say the same thing. Rick Rubin, one of the most influential music producers of the past half-century, describes great work as something that exists “in the space between people,” shaped by the exchanges and tensions that occur when minds meet. “The synergy of the group is as important – if not more important – than the talent of the individuals,” he says. Creativity is not a personal possession but a shared condition. Ed Catmull, Pixar’s co-founder, built an entire studio around the idea that when talented people collaborate well, they produce work no individual could conceive alone.

But the myth of the lone genius persists anyway, because it is useful. As the critic William Deresiewicz writes, “The genius is not born but made, and made by the system that needs him.” Fashion needs the genius because luxury needs the genius. A single name simplifies marketing. A visionary origin story helps justify a price tag disconnected from material reality. If we believe a handbag was touched by creative lightning rather than manufactured by skilled workers, the premium becomes easier to swallow.

The legal case for attribution

The myth also obscures labour relations. When we see genius, we don’t see workers. And here is what makes fashion’s position increasingly indefensible: there is no legal basis for it.

International copyright law, through the Berne Convention, recognises an author’s right to attribution. Even if you’ve sold all commercial rights to your creation, even if someone else now owns and profits from it, you retain the right to be named as its author. In many European countries, this right cannot be waived. A contract stating “you agree to remain anonymous” may not be enforceable, because attribution is considered inherent to your dignity as a creator.

Fashion law scholar Heidi Härkönen has shown that, under EU copyright standards, any designer who makes free and creative choices holds authorship rights. “There is no legally valid reason for fashion houses to overlook designers’ right of attribution,” she concludes. The refusal to credit is cultural, not legal.

Härkönen also explains why designers don’t sue: “The world of fashion is very small and powerful. One cannot expect a designer... to rise against their employers or commissioners by suing them for infringement of moral rights. Such actions could risk their entire future in the field.” Even in France, where contractual waivers of moral rights are legally void, “the French fashion industry seems to be more powerful than the French law.” Designers do not refrain from asserting their rights because they lack them, but because the cost of enforcing them is ruinous. The absence of enforcement reflects a power imbalance, not consent.

Jane Ginsburg, a leading copyright scholar at Columbia, is blunt about this. Attribution, she writes, is not decorative. It is “an ethical obligation within systems of creative labour.” Taking credit for work you didn’t do is wrong. Denying credit to those who did is equally wrong. She insists that even when designers work for a brand, even when their work is “made on demand,” if they exercised creative judgment – solved problems, made choices, shaped outcomes – they deserve to be treated as the “source” of their work.

Why transparency matters

Some argue that fashion’s practices are simply how things are done. But Härkönen cites a principle from Nordic legal doctrine that cuts through this: “Poor customs can never be converted into proper usage.”

Fashion’s culture of invisibility developed during decades when copyright protection for clothing was uncertain. The industry wasn’t accustomed to viewing its products as protected creative works, so it never built systems to honour the creators. But the legal landscape has changed. The EU now treats fashion the same as fine art for copyright purposes. The historical excuse no longer applies. The law has moved on. Fashion has not.

The counterargument – that attribution is impractical – falls apart under scrutiny. A designer’s name could appear on a garment’s care label, its online product description, its digital product passport, or show notes. Adding a designer credit would be trivially easy. Fashion houses choose not to because the myth of singular genius is more valuable than the truth of collective effort.

Fashion suffers from chronic turnover and constant talent churn. Houses invest years training designers, then watch them leave, often not for better opportunities but simply to escape the erasure. Recognition is one of the strongest predictors of retention. Fashion ignores this at its own cost.

What changes when you name the team?

First, careers become traceable. A young designer can see who did the knitwear they admire, who developed the fabric innovation they want to learn from. Pathways become visible, and visible pathways become possible.

Second, the industry becomes accountable. When we know who created something, we can evaluate their body of work, trace influences, and understand how talent develops. We can ask why certain people advance and others don’t. We can see patterns that invisibility obscures.

Third, the story changes. John Berger argued that what we perceive is shaped by the stories we’re told about who created it. When we understand a collection as the product of collective expertise – the knitwear specialist, the print designer, the pattern cutter who solved an impossible construction – we see it differently. Not diminished, but enriched. The work becomes a record of collaboration rather than a projection of individual mystique.

Fashion can continue manufacturing geniuses while hiding the workers who make the clothes. Or it can join every other creative industry in acknowledging a basic truth: the work has always been collective, even when the credit wasn’t.

The credits are overdue.