When Gladys Lai described her role as Head of Brand at Vogue Australia as that of a “custodian”, my mind went to The Lord of the Rings.

There is a scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, where Gandalf stands alone on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, suspended above a dark abyss, as the rest of the Fellowship races through the Mines of Moria. As the Balrog descends upon them, Gandalf raises his staff and declares, “You shall not pass.”

While Lai’s remit is less apocalyptic, the comparison is not such a far cry. 

As Head of Brand, she is responsible for safeguarding the voice of Vogue Australia: deciding what belongs within its world, what must go, and what shall not pass. And yet, she is not simply guarding the bridge. 

She is building one of her own, framing fashion through the lens of history, politics and aesthetic theory, and bringing her distinctive way of seeing to an institution she has been entrusted to preserve.

I sat down with Lai to discuss the craft behind her editorial voice, the making of a career in fashion media, and what it takes to preserve the authority of a legacy title in an era of collapsing attention spans.

On Writing as Her First Love

Long before Lai entered fashion media, she was a devoted reader. 

By the age of nine, she had already fallen in love with Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Tolkien. Writing grew alongside that appetite for literature. 

“Writing was my first love,” she tells me, “and I think it really has underpinned everything that I have come to love in the years since.”

When I ask who her style icons were growing up, Lai tells me she was drawn less to celebrities than to imagined worlds: the medieval armour, elaborate headdresses and costumes of The Lord of the Rings, Disney princesses, ancient Egyptian jewellery and the clothing preserved in art and history.

“I feel like all of those style influences were drawn from areas that weren’t strictly, conventionally fashion,” she says. “It was clothing in the sense of a study of how people used to dress and what it says about a culture and a time.”

That instinct still shapes her work. Lai does not treat fashion as an isolated subject, but as a way of reading culture, history, politics and aesthetics.

On Studying Law 

When I ask whether she had always imagined a career in fashion media, Lai laughs and shakes her head.

“I never considered it as a career path,” she says. “I don’t think it was painted out as possible for me. No one I knew worked in fashion.”

Her understanding of the industry was, by her own admission, limited to The Devil Wears Prada. The life she pictured for herself was quieter.

“I wanted to work in a library or an archive somewhere,” she confesses, “somewhere decidedly maybe unfashionable and a bit naff.”

When I ask why she initially pursued law, Lai is clear that it was never the dream. Neither, at first, was journalism. She had planned to study arts and pursue history or art history, but conversations about prestige, employability and the apparent waste of good marks pushed her towards a combined law degree.

“I had conversations with people about the so-called prestige of studying a law degree alongside an arts degree, and how I would be, quote unquote, ‘wasting the marks that I got’ if I just did an arts degree,” she says.

She is less diplomatic about that logic now.

“That is obviously such a backwards way of thinking. It is not how anything works, and it is really regressive.”

The promise attached to law was familiar: stability, professional legitimacy and a career path visible from the outside. Lai describes it as the “safety net” she had been told she needed, although the metaphor looks less convincing in retrospect.

“At the stage of my life where I am now, I think it is very funny that a safety net is a five-year degree in which you need to do another year of practice before you get admitted,” she says.

She remains grateful for the degree. Law taught her resilience, though her interest lay in the parts of the curriculum that rewarded argument, interpretation and the written word.

“It was the historian in me that found the most interest in the least fiscally attractive parts of a law degree,” she says. “I loved writing essays.”

Throughout her degree, writing remained the constant.

“I had considered writing secondary to all of these other things and all of my other interests,” she says. “Then I thought, what if just the craft of writing was the job?”

On Her First Day at Vogue 

Lai’s entry into Vogue came when she was about 19, midway through her degree, after the kind of chance encounter that sounds as though it belongs in a film. She met the then editor-in-chief at a networking event; they spoke, and Lai was asked to send through her résumé. An interview followed soon after.

For the occasion, she wore a black woollen turtleneck, gingham cigarette trousers and a pair of little black Repettos she still owns.

“It was very Audrey Hepburn, Roman Holiday kind of style,” she says. “Very straightforward. I was not trying to do anything. It was just a little bit more put together.”

The romance of the beginning soon gave way to discipline. Lai interned for a year while studying full-time and working two other jobs. Some days began at seven in the morning and ended with lectures or tutorials late in the evening. Her weekends belonged to her second job.

“I would literally never do that again,” she says. “I don’t know why I did that to myself.”

The internship itself was unusual. On her first day, rather than being relegated to coffee runs, Lai was asked to review a Louis Vuitton Cruise show. She had never written about a runway before.

“Completely fresh,” she says. “I just launched into it. I had no clue what I was doing. I just started writing.”

The piece was published, and more assignments followed.

“I was writing from day one,” she says.

Years of reading had already given her an instinct for structure, even if the subject was new.

“I think I understood what structure was demanded of me by the task,” she says. “It came pretty naturally.”

On Becoming Head of Brand

Lai did not arrive at the Head of Brand role through one swift promotion. She noticed what was missing, then began doing it.

“I have, and still do have, a tendency to overexert myself and overextend myself into other parts of the job,” she says. “If I see a gap in a workflow, I will just fill it.”

As a content editor, that meant taking on work that sat beyond the formal limits of her title. 

“I naturally took on all of these other responsibilities that no one else was claiming,” she says. “I was like, ‘Well, I would like to have my title reflect that difference.’”

Her interest was never limited to the page. The writing mattered most, but so did the machinery around it: where money came from, how editorial decisions were made, how an audience behaved and how commercial interests shaped the work.

“The purely creative part of the writing is always going to be what drives me,” she says. “But I was also interested in how the business ran, where money came from, how money influenced what we wrote, and just having a more 360-degree picture of the business.”

That curiosity led her into strategy, data and analytics, then into a Head of Brand role at GQ and later Vogue Australia.

“It is a very widely spread-out role,” she says.

Writing, interviewing and editing remain central. Lai fields pitches, helps writers shape and structure stories, and decides whether an idea belongs within the editorial world of Vogue. The role also extends into social strategy, audience development, community building, video production and commercial partnerships.

“I have a very clear understanding of what is off brand, and how to make something that is off brand on brand, or whether it should not be a Vogue topic,” she says. 

Custodianship, in this sense, involves knowing the institution intimately enough to recognise its boundaries and knowing when those boundaries should move.

On How to Write for Vogue

Fashion media has a reputation for opacity, and Lai does little to dispute it. 

“It is not very clear how to get into it,” she nods. 

Her advice is simpler: reach out.

She answers DMs, meets aspiring writers for coffee and encourages people to cold email, cold message, and be “a bit annoying”. “If one person responds, it is great.”

The path into publishing is also less dependent on being chosen by a magazine than it once was. Substack and social platforms allow writers to build a body of work on their own terms. Still, Lai says the modern editor must be more than a writer. “I do not think anyone is a straight writer anymore,” she says.

A colleague recently used the term “creative generalist”, which Lai thinks captures the shift. A writer should understand narrative, but also visual direction, video, audience, packaging, commerce and platform behaviour.

“All of that is important,” she says, “and it bolsters your writing.”

On the Future of Fashion Media

The most difficult part of Lai’s role is not celebrity, pressure or the demand to produce at speed. It is the instability of the industry around her.

“Traditional media has never been in a more volatile position,” she says. 

For years, digital publishing was seen as the answer to the decline of print. That certainty has disappeared.

“People were talking about the death of print for ages,” Lai says. “Now it is even really the death of digital media.”

The line between old and new media has narrowed, while advertising money has shifted towards platforms and individual creators. Vogue must participate in that system without becoming indistinguishable from it.

“The most difficult part of the job is: how do you evolve a brand while keeping true to its roots, but also understanding that technology and consumer behaviour are shifting radically in a really short period of time?”

That question returns to the idea of custodianship. Preserving authority does not mean insisting that the future must resemble the past. It means recognising what must remain intact when everything around it changes.

Ultimately, Lai’s role places her at that threshold: between the magazine and the platform, the archive and the feed, the past and the future.

___________________________________________________________

Behind the Seams is a series by Chloe Lei that explores the paths of those who began in law before finding their way into fashion.

Through conversations with fashion founders, designers and creatives, the series offers a glimpse into what it really takes to step away from the conventional path and follow the pull of fashion.

The post A Million Girls Would Kill for This Job: In Conversation with Vogue Australia’s Head of Brand, Gladys Lai appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

— Mark Twain

In the summer of 1923, an American couple asked a hotel proprietor on the French Riviera to do something unprecedented: keep the hotel open. It was May. Every establishment on the Côte d’Azur had already shuttered for the season, as they always did, as they had always done. The Mediterranean coast in summer was not a destination. It was a gap in the calendar, a dead zone between the European aristocracy’s arrival in January and their departure in spring. The couple’s names were Gerald and Sara Murphy. The hotel was the Hotel du Cap in Antibes. The proprietor, persuaded by their particular kind of American confidence and disposable income, agreed.

What followed that summer was, by any measure, extraordinary. Pablo Picasso came. F. Scott Fitzgerald came. Ernest Hemingway came. Diaghilev came. Gerald cleared a four-foot layer of seaweed from La Garoupe beach so they could swim. They sunbathed, which was so alien a behavior that locals reportedly stood at a distance to watch. They played jazz from a portable phonograph on the sand. Sara wore almost nothing. Picasso painted. Fitzgerald absorbed everything into his nervous system and would later exhale it as Tender Is the Night.

None of this, on its surface, sounds like the founding act of a commercial mythology worth hundreds of billions of euros. But that is precisely what it was. The Murphys did not invent leisure. They invented a specific grammar of leisure: sun, coast, intellectual adjacency, the performance of beautiful idleness, the suggestion that to be here, in this particular light, wearing these particular clothes, constitutes a form of arrival. That grammar has not changed in a century. Every Euro Summer collection produced today, every resort show staged at Cap d’Antibes or Capri or the Amalfi Coast, every TikTok video tagged with that phrase and shot in golden-hour linen is, in its essential structure, a quotation of what the Murphys assembled on that beach in 1923.

The question worth asking in 2026 is not why the Euro Summer looks the way it looks. It is why it never stops being relevant, never stops generating revenue, never succumbs to the forces of obsolescence that claim almost every other aesthetic category the fashion industry produces. The answer is not sentimental. It is architectural.

A Hotel That Was Never Supposed to Be Open

To understand the Euro Summer’s commercial permanence, you need to understand what it is not. It is not a trend. Trends are temporally bounded; they emerge in response to a specific cultural moment and expire when that moment passes. The coastal grandmother trend of 2022, the quiet luxury cycle of 2023, the mob-wife maximalism of early 2024: all were trends, all had identifiable peaks, all showed signs of deceleration within twelve to eighteen months of their emergence. The Euro Summer has been ‘trending’ since approximately 1923 with no meaningful interruption. This is not trendiness. This is something else entirely.

What separates the Euro Summer from every trend it superficially resembles is its geographical anchoring. Its commercial value does not derive from a design vocabulary — the linen, the espadrilles, the straw bag, the gold-tone ring. Those are symptoms, not causes. Its value derives from a set of specific physical places, the Côte d’Azur, Capri, Positano, Mykonos, the Amalfi Coast, whose characteristic qualities cannot be manufactured elsewhere, substituted with equivalents, or rendered obsolete by changing taste.

The Euro Summer sells the one thing intellectual property law has never figured out how to protect: the irreducible charge of a specific geography.

You can copy the dress. You can copy the silhouette, the colorway, the weight of the fabric, and the construction of the sandal. What you cannot copy is the specific angle of Mediterranean light at six in the evening, the thermal quality of that particular sea, the accumulated cultural sediment of Picasso and Bardot and Kennedy and every Grand Tourist who wrote rapturously about the coast of southern France since Tobias Smollett did so in 1764. Geography does not depreciate. It does not go out of season. And this is why the fashion industry’s most enduring commercial mythology is also, at its root, a story about real estate.

There is a legal concept that illuminates this dynamic with unusual precision: the geographical indication, or GI, protected under Article 22 of the TRIPS Agreement and elaborated extensively in European law, most recently through EU Regulation 2024/1143. A geographical indication identifies a good as originating in a territory where a given quality or reputation is essentially attributable to its geographical origin. Champagne cannot be Champagne unless it comes from Champagne. Parma ham is not Parma ham unless it comes from Parma. The value is territorial. The protection is, in legal terms, perpetual.

GI doctrine was designed for goods, not aesthetics. There is no formal geographical indication for ‘the Riviera look.’ But the framework captures something true about why the Euro Summer’s commercial logic is so different from that of other luxury positioning strategies. When Louis Vuitton calls a collection ‘By the Pool’ and shoots it at Cap d’Antibes, or when Dior stages its resort show against the cliffs of Positano, or when Jacquemus photographs its bags on a sun-bleached terrace somewhere between Nice and Monaco, these brands are not merely using a location as a backdrop. They are invoking a territorial value that no competitor can replicate, because no competitor owns the Mediterranean. What they are doing, in commercial terms, is borrowing the perpetuity of a place and attaching it to a product.

In 2009, the Riviera Côte d’Azur Regional Tourism Committee went so far as to formally register ‘Cote d’Azur’ as a brand with the French national industrial property institute, the INPI. The coastline that Stephen Liegeard named in his 1887 book, the place that became the setting for the Murphys’ founding summer, was trademarked. The dream became, legally speaking, intellectual property. This feels like a footnote. It is not. It is the logical conclusion of a century of accumulated semiotic investment: geography as brand.

Coco Chanel and the Permission Structure of the Tan

The Murphys created the stage. It was Coco Chanel who gave everyone else permission to perform on it. Her accidental tan of 1923, acquired aboard the Duke of Westminster’s yacht, performed a semiotic overhaul so complete that it is difficult, a century later, to fully appreciate its radicalism. Before Chanel, a tan was the mark of agricultural labor, outdoor work, and the lower classes. After Chanel, a tan was the mark of a woman who had been somewhere warm and beautiful, with the time and the money to sit in the sun. She did not merely make tanning fashionable. She inverted the entire class vocabulary of skin.

For the business of Euro Summer, the Chanel intervention matters as the first instance of what the aesthetic has depended on ever since: authoritative endorsement that transforms a lifestyle practice into a commercial aspiration. When a figure of sufficient cultural gravity inhabits an aesthetic and exports it through their public persona, the aesthetic acquires a quality that marketing budgets alone cannot purchase. It becomes self-referential: desirable because it has been desired by the right people, aspirational because it has already been the object of the right aspiration. The Euro Summer acquired this property in 1923 through the Murphys, deepened it through Chanel, then compounded it through half a century of figures — Brigitte Bardot in Saint-Tropez, Grace Kelly in Monaco, Jacqueline Kennedy in Ravello, Slim Aarons photographing all of them — whose accumulated glamour functions as collateral for every luxury brand that invokes the Mediterranean today.

This is what fashion lawyers and brand strategists call secondary meaning: the acquired distinctiveness that attaches to a set of visual signals through long use and consistent cultural association. The Euro Summer’s secondary meaning has been accruing for one hundred years. It is, by any reasonable measure, the best-capitalized secondary meaning in the history of fashion.

The Conglomerate and the Geography It Doesn’t Own but Controls

Understanding why the Euro Summer never stops generating revenue requires understanding who profits from it and how the business is structured. The answer, increasingly, is the European luxury conglomerate: LVMH and Kering, principally, with Prada Group now a more formidable third presence following its acquisition of Versace in December 2025.

LVMH, formed in 1987 through the merger of Louis Vuitton and Moët Hennessy under Bernard Arnault, reported revenues of EUR 84.68 billion for 2024, with Fashion and Leather Goods accounting for nearly half of that figure. Its portfolio of more than seventy-five houses — Christian Dior, Fendi, Celine, Loewe, Loro Piana, Givenchy, Bulgari, Tiffany — does not merely cover multiple price points. It covers multiple registers of the Euro Summer aesthetic. Loro Piana sells to the client who actually has a boat. Dior sells to the client who aspires to be the woman who has a boat. Sephora sells to the client who aspires to be the woman who buys Dior. Every transaction in this vertically integrated desire economy is, in some sense, a purchase of Euro Summer adjacency.

Kering’s acquisition of a thirty percent stake in Valentino for EUR 1.7 billion in 2024 extended its reach into the specifically Roman-Italian dimension of the Euro Summer: the florals, the lace, the dolce vita excess that Pierpaolo Piccioli spent nearly a decade perfecting. EssilorLuxottica’s purchase of Supreme was, at first glance, a streetwear story; look again and it is also the absorption of a young, aspirational demographic into the conglomerate that already owns Ray-Ban and Persol, which are to the Euro Summer sunglass what the espadrille is to the shoe. And Prada’s acquisition of Versace from Capri Holdings repositions Milan as a genuine counterweight to Paris in the geography of luxury consolidation — returning to Italian ownership a house whose entire aesthetic vocabulary, Mediterranean color, Greco-Roman motif, uninhibited sensuality, is inseparable from the Euro Summer imaginary.

The effect of this consolidation, taken in aggregate, is the reduction of the Euro Summer aesthetic to a conglomerate-controlled intellectual property ecosystem. Not owned in the formal, registrable sense. But controlled through the progressive acquisition of every major brand that has, over decades, constituted itself as the authorized vocabulary of Mediterranean luxury. The dress, the bag, the sandal, the sunglasses, the fragrance, the hotel: across these categories, the dominant commercial positions are held by a handful of conglomerates whose structural interest in the perpetuation of the Euro Summer mythology is, at this point, essentially permanent.

The Resort Collection: Fashion’s Most Honest Commercial Category

The business mechanism through which the Euro Summer most directly generates revenue is the resort collection, also called Cruise or Pre-Spring, depending on the house. Resort originated as a practical commercial category: wealthy clients who spent the Northern Hemisphere winter in warmer climates needed clothes that the main seasonal collections, designed for temperate spring and autumn runways, did not provide. By the 1960s, it had evolved into a distinct creative season occupying the May-June window between Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter.

Resort is, from a unit economics perspective, the most purely Euro Summer-optimized commercial offering in the fashion calendar. It is designed explicitly for warm-weather leisure. Its retail prices are generally lower than mainline runway pieces, making it the most commercially accessible entry point into a luxury house’s seasonal world. And it is shown, almost invariably, in locations of maximum Mediterranean symbolic charge. LVMH houses have staged resort shows in Cannes, Capri, Athens, Monte Carlo, and Porto. Gucci showed its 2018 resort collection at the Palatine Hill in Rome. The Dior resort show in 2022 was held in Seville; in 2023, in Mumbai; but the Mediterranean gravitational pull always reasserts itself, because the show location is not incidental to the collection. It is the collection’s primary signifying context. The geography authenticates the garment.

There is a legal dimension to this practice that rarely surfaces in fashion industry conversations. When a brand chooses to stage a show within a UNESCO World Heritage Site, or within a French administrative territory, it activates a complex set of permitting requirements and intellectual property questions around the photographic rights of third-party architectural structures. French law has grappled with the doctrine of droit à l’image des biens, the principle that property owners may assert rights over commercial photographic uses of their property, a doctrine that has been substantially curtailed following litigation but that still creates legal exposure for brands shooting editorial content in France’s most iconic settings. The practical implication: the most geographically authentic locations for Euro Summer content production are precisely the most legally complicated to use. Aspiration, it turns out, is also a compliance exercise.

TikTok and the Geography of Displaced Desire

Something interesting happened to the Euro Summer around 2022. It became a TikTok category. Videos tagged with the phrase accumulated hundreds of millions of views. Styling guides proliferated. The ‘European summer aesthetic’ — linen separates, top-handle bags, old-money silhouettes, intentional detailing, the general suggestion of having arrived by train from Paris — became one of the dominant fashion reference points for a generation of consumers who had never been to Europe and, in many cases, had no immediate prospect of going.

This development is not, as some critics framed it, a dilution of the Euro Summer’s commercial value. It is an amplification of its demand base without any corresponding expansion of its supply. The Riviera remains physically scarce. The Hôtel du Cap has the same number of rooms it had in 1923. The cliffs above Positano have not grown. What TikTok accomplished was the globalization of desire for an experience that is structurally inaccessible to the majority of people who now desire it — and the consequent redirection of that desire into the purchase of Euro Summer-adjacent goods.

Scarcity, as luxury economics has always understood, is not merely a condition of production. It is the condition of value.

This dynamic – aspirational displacement purchasing, to give it a more precise name — is structurally beneficial to the conglomerate luxury economy for a specific reason. The Côte d’Azur in August remains beyond the reach of the majority of the Euro Summer’s global audience. But the Dior Addict lipstick photographed at Cap d’Antibes, the Jacquemus bag shot against terracotta, the Loro Piana linen shorts that code as ‘person who summers in southern France‘: these are purchasable. They are the portable, price-differentiated proxies for an experience that cannot itself be purchased at most price points. And the conglomerates that own the brands that own the aesthetic benefit from every transaction at every stratum.

The stylist Carlotta Constant, who splits her time between London and Monaco, articulated the mechanism with unusual clarity when she told Refinery29 that the Euro Summer ‘allows people to romanticize their lives, letting them bring out the best versions of themselves.’ This is the correct analysis, but it understates the commercial structure behind the romance. What it also does is generate perpetual, geographically grounded, conglomerate-captured revenue at a global scale, from consumers who are purchasing not a garment but a fantasy of arrival. The garment is the delivery mechanism. The fantasy is the product.

Why It Will Never End

Fashion has a well-documented tendency to declare the death of its own categories and then quietly resurrect them eighteen months later. The Euro Summer has never required resurrection. It has never died. Understanding why requires holding three structural conditions in view simultaneously.

The first is geographical irreducibility. The aesthetic is anchored to a physical place whose characteristic qualities cannot be manufactured elsewhere or substituted by equivalent alternatives. The Mediterranean coast has specific climatic properties, a specific quality of light, and a specific accumulation of cultural history that has no substitute. This is not nostalgia. It is geography. And geography, unlike a design trend or a cultural moment, does not expire.

The second is social stratification encoding. Every element of the Euro Summer grammar operates simultaneously as a social classifier and as an aspirational object. The weight of the gold, the grade of the linen, the construction of the sandal: each of these signals distinction in a way legible across cultural contexts. The quiet luxury register of the Euro Summer — Loro Piana, Brunello Cucinelli, The Row’s Mediterranean offerings — achieves what Pierre Bourdieu identified as the highest form of distinction: the communication of superiority through the deliberate suppression of its legible markers. The most expensive Euro Summer items look, to the untrained eye, like nothing at all.

The third is mythological depth. The Euro Summer is connected to a founding narrative of sufficient cultural prestige that it confers retrospective legitimacy on every new instantiation. The Murphys, Picasso, Fitzgerald, Chanel, Bardot, the Train Bleu, the Slim Aarons photographs, the New Wave films shot on the Riviera, the entire cultural apparatus of mid-century Mediterranean Europe: this is not a mood board. It is a century of accumulated authority. When a brand invokes it, it borrows that authority. The mythology functions as non-registrable intellectual property — it cannot be owned, but it can be consistently cited, and citation, done well, is indistinguishable from ownership.

No trend possesses all three of these properties. Most trends possess none of them. This is why the Euro Summer sits in a category of its own, why it has outlasted every aesthetic cycle that has risen and fallen around it, and why the fashion industry’s most sophisticated commercial actors — the luxury conglomerates with their long-term capital structures and their historical perspectives — continue to build significant portions of their annual revenue on it.

The Hotel That Never Closed

The Hôtel du Cap has not closed for the summer since Gerald Murphy convinced its proprietor to stay open in 1923. This single fact is, in miniature, the entire story of the Euro Summer: an anomaly that became a practice that became a mythology that became an industry.

What the fashion industry built on top of that mythology is worth examining without sentimentality. It is a vertically integrated commercial ecosystem in which geographic aspiration is manufactured, packaged, and sold at every price point from the EUR 12 Dior lip maximizer to the EUR 12,000 Loro Piana cashmere coat, all drawing on the same underlying territorial value that no brand actually owns and no legislation currently protects. The legal architecture has not caught up with the commercial reality. There is no IP framework adequate to the Euro Summer’s actual value proposition, which is not a product or a mark or a design, but a dream of a specific place.

Mark Twain was right, in the end. There are no new ideas, only the kaleidoscope. But some configurations of old ideas are so precisely calibrated to permanent human desires — for beauty, for warmth, for the performance of having arrived — that they never require replacement. The Euro Summer is the fashion industry’s most successful kaleidoscope. It has been turning for a century. The light through it is still the light of the Riviera in late afternoon, and the product being sold is still, at its core, the same thing the Murphys were selling when they played jazz on an empty beach in 1923: the proposition that this, specifically this, is where you want to be.

The Mediterranean has no plans to relocate. Which means the industry built on it has no plans to stop

Legal References

TRIPS Agreement, Art. 22 (1994). EU Regulation 2024/1143 on geographical indications. EU Trademark Regulation 2017/1001. Lanham Act, s. 43(a). Institut National de la Propriete Industrielle (INPI), Brand Registration of Cote d’Azur (2009). Tribunal de grande instance, Societe Civile du Domaine de Valmer v. Raveneau (2004).

Selected Sources

Amanda Vaill, Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy (Broadway Books, 1998). Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957). Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1979). LVMH Annual Report 2024. Kering 2024 Universal Registration Document. TheIndustry.fashion, Major M&A Deals in Fashion, December 2025. Refinery29, The European Summer Trend, June 2024. The Good Life France, How the French Riviera Became a Summer Destination (2024). Gisetudestouristiques.fr, Encyclopedie: Cote d’Azur.

The post Sun as Signifier: The Euro Summer Never Goes Out of Style. Here is exactly why it cannot. appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

For a long time, the teenage girl had a world of her own.

It lived somewhere between childhood and adulthood, in the soft chaos of Disney Channel premieres, glossy teen magazines, friendship bracelets, Claire’s earrings, Justice graphic tees, celebrity posters, and Saturday afternoons spent wandering the mall with no real agenda. It was awkward, colorful, sometimes embarrassing, and often over-accessorized. But it was a world. It gave girls a space to try on identity without having to arrive anywhere too quickly.

Today, that in-between feels harder to find.

A thirteen-year-old no longer has to wait for a magazine, a Disney star, or a mall storefront to tell her what is cool. She opens TikTok and meets the entire adult beauty economy at once. Skincare routines, Sephora hauls, “clean girl” tutorials, Stanley cups, Lululemon fits, anti-ageing language, and aesthetic labels arrive in the same feed. Childhood does not disappear overnight. But the commercial space once built around adolescence has been compressed, accelerated, and absorbed into something far less forgiving.

The Teenager Was Always a Market

It is worth remembering that the “teenager” was never a purely natural category. The term became widely recognized in the 1940s, as youth culture emerged as a distinct social and commercial force. More young people were staying in school, child labor had declined, and advertisers began to recognize adolescents as a separate consumer group with their own tastes, rituals, and spending power.

In that sense, the modern teenager emerged not only as a social category but also as a commercial one. Both boys and girls became important consumer groups, but the teenage girl would eventually become one of the most influential cultural and marketing demographics of the twentieth century. Fashion, music, film, magazines, and television helped build her world. Brands did not simply respond to teenage identity; they actively participated in shaping it.

That is not necessarily a cynical observation. Every generation needs cultural markers. The problem today is not that teenagers consume. They always have. The problem is that the market no longer seems interested in giving them a protected middle ground. Instead, it feeds them adult-coded products, adult anxieties, and adult performance metrics before they have had time to be clumsy.

The Collapse of Teen Culture

For decades, teen media created a shared cultural rhythm. Seventeen, Teen Vogue, J-14, Tiger Beat, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, and early YouTube all helped form a recognizable teenage ecosystem. It had its own celebrities, language, clothes, crushes, scandals, and rituals.

That ecosystem has fractured. Streaming weakened the idea of a generational television moment. Social media replaced the magazine editor with the algorithm. TikTok does not care whether a viewer is thirteen, twenty-three, or thirty-three if the content keeps her watching.

The result is that teenage girls often consume the same beauty and fashion content as adult women. At first glance, that may appear empowering, but it also removes a developmental buffer. There is less room for the awkward phase, less room to experiment privately, and less room to be badly dressed before the internet teaches you that every outfit belongs to an aesthetic.

This is one of the quieter cultural losses of the platform era: teenagers are not only being watched more often. They are being categorized faster.

Where Did the Tween Store Go?

Fashion tells the story clearly.

There was once an entire retail universe designed for girls who were not children anymore, but not quite women. Justice, Limited Too, Delia’s, Claire’s, Wet Seal, Aeropostale, Abercrombie Kids, and early Hollister all helped define the tween and teen wardrobe. Some of it was chaotic. Some of it was questionable. But it was age-specific.

That market has weakened dramatically. Many of those stores closed, downsized, or lost cultural relevance as malls declined and e-commerce transformed how young consumers shop. In Teen Vogue’s “Where Did All The Tween Fashion Go?”, trend forecaster Katherine Irving notes that brands struggle with the tween market because it is brief, transitional, and difficult to retain. Customers move through it quickly, making constant acquisition expensive.

That is the business problem. The cultural problem is bigger.

If tween fashion no longer has a strong retail home, young girls shop where everyone else shops: Amazon, SHEIN, H&M, Lululemon, Nike, PacSun, Sephora, and whatever TikTok pushes that week. Piper Sandler’s teen surveys continue to show how central digital retail and major lifestyle brands have become to teenage spending habits. The old tween store did not vanish because girls stopped caring about style. It vanished because the market found faster, broader, more scalable ways to sell style to them.

The Algorithmic Aesthetic

The modern teenage girl does not just buy clothes. She is asked to select an identity.

Cottagecore. Coquette. Clean girl. Vanilla girl. Barbiecore. Preppy. Balletcore. Mob wife. Quiet luxury. The list changes quickly, but the structure remains the same: each “core” offers a full visual script. Clothes, makeup, hair, room decor, personality, lifestyle. It is identity packaged as an aesthetic.

Fashion historian Shelby Ivey Christie has pointed to the algorithm as a central force in this shift. The pressure is no longer only to dress well, but to know what category you belong to. For girls still forming a sense of self, that pressure can be intense. Style used to be a space for trial and error. Now, trial and error can be documented, judged, and resurfaced.

That changes the stakes. A bad outfit used to live in a family photo album. Now it can become content. No wonder younger consumers may lean toward already-approved aesthetics. The algorithm rewards legibility. Retailers benefit from it. A girl who knows her “core” is easier to target.

Sephora Kids and the Beauty of Growing Up Too Fast

The beauty industry has made this shift impossible to ignore.

The rise of “Sephora Kids” became one of the clearest symbols of the new tween consumer. Preteens began buying or requesting prestige skincare products, including brands like Drunk Elephant and Glow Recipe. Dermatologists have warned that some active ingredients, including retinoids, exfoliating acids, and strong vitamin C products, are unnecessary or potentially irritating for young skin. Even when a product is not dangerous, the message around it matters.

A child does not need anti-ageing language.

This is not about mocking girls for wanting skincare. Self-care can be playful. Beauty can be creative. The concern is the early importation of adult anxieties into childhood. Wrinkles, pores, texture, dullness, firmness, glow, and prevention. These are not neutral words. They train the eye to search for problems.

The business model is powerful because it not only sells products. It sells vigilance. And vigilance, once learned young, can become a lifelong customer relationship.

What Law Can and Cannot Fix

This is where fashion law enters the conversation.

There are existing rules around advertising to children, influencer marketing, privacy, and consumer protection. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission requires advertisers and influencers to disclose material connections and avoid deceptive marketing. COPPA regulates the collection of personal information from children under 13. In Canada and other jurisdictions, advertising standards and privacy rules increasingly recognize that minors require heightened protection.

But the law is still playing catch-up.

Much of the existing framework was designed for a world where advertising looked like advertising. A television commercial. A magazine spread. A sponsored campaign. Today, marketing often looks like a routine, a recommendation, a “get ready with me,” a TikTok trend, or a child influencer’s bedroom shelf.

The difficulty is not simply disclosure. It is an environment. When children and teens encounter advertising inside social content, peer culture, algorithmic feeds, and aspirational aesthetics, the commercial message becomes harder to isolate. A hashtag may disclose sponsorship, but it does not undo the pressure to belong.

Fashion and beauty brands may not always market directly to children, but they benefit from ecosystems where children encounter adult-coded products through influencers, viral trends, and peer imitation. That is the grey zone regulators will have to take more seriously.

The End of the In-Between

The teenage girl has not disappeared. She is still here.

What has disappeared, or at least weakened, is the world that once gave her room to be in-between. The stores are fewer. The magazines are gone or transformed. The mall is no longer the same third space. It was not merely a place to shop. It was a place to socialize, experiment, and exist outside the supervision of both school and home. Many of those spaces have disappeared or migrated online. What replaced them often comes with algorithms, metrics, and constant visibility. The television shows no longer gather a generation in the same way. The internet offers endless choice, but very little shelter.

This is not a call to romanticize the past. Teen culture was never perfect. It had its own exclusions, pressures, and commercial manipulation. But it did understand one thing the current market often forgets: adolescence is not just a smaller version of adulthood.

The legal question is not whether girls should be allowed to enjoy fashion, beauty, or online culture. Of course they should. The more urgent question is whether the industries profiting from their attention owe them a higher duty of care.

Because if consumer culture helped invent the teenage girl, it should not be allowed to erase her simply because adult aspiration sells faster.

The teenage girl has not disappeared. The world simply stopped making room for her.

References

– Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, Viking, 2007.  

– TIME, “The Invention of Teenagers: LIFE and the Triumph of Youth Culture,” 2014.  

– Aiyana Ishmael, “Where Did All The Tween Fashion Go?”, Teen Vogue, 2022.  

– Piper Sandler, Taking Stock With Teens Survey, Spring 2025.  

– Business Insider, “From Hollister to UGG, teen fashion is hitting rewind,” 2025.  

– The Guardian, “‘She has a hyaluronic acid and niacinamide serum’: the curious boom in skincare for tweens,” 2024.  

– The Guardian, “Sephora workers on the rise of chaotic child shoppers,” 2025.  

– The Washington Post, “The tween skin care obsession: How worried should we be?”, 2024.  

– Federal Trade Commission, “Children: Advertising and Marketing,” Business Guidance.  

– Federal Trade Commission, “Endorsements, Influencers, and Reviews,” Business Guidance.  

– Ad Standards Canada, Influencer Marketing Disclosure Guidelines, 2025.  

– Covington Inside Privacy, “State and Federal Developments in Minors’ Privacy in 2025,” 2025.

The post The Disappearance of the Teenage Girl   appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

The transformation of Formula 1 from a niche sporting event into a cultural phenomenon has attracted some of the world’s most recognizable luxury brands. Fashion houses, watchmakers, cosmetics companies, technology giants, and lifestyle brands increasingly view Formula 1 as an aspirational marketing platform capable of delivering global visibility and access to affluent consumers. The result is a sophisticated commercial ecosystem built upon licensing, sponsorship, merchandising, advertising, digital content, and brand collaborations.

Behind every Formula 1 fashion collection, luxury partnership, celebrity campaign, and co-branded product lies a carefully structured framework of intellectual property rights. Trademarks, copyrights, designs, image rights, and contractual protections collectively enable stakeholders to monetize their brands while preserving exclusivity and commercial value.

As Formula 1 continues to expand its influence beyond the racetrack, it offers one of the most compelling case studies of intellectual property commercialization in the modern luxury economy.

Formula 1: From Sporting Competition to Global Lifestyle Brand

Historically, Formula 1 generated revenue through broadcasting rights, race-hosting fees, sponsorships, and ticket sales. While these revenue streams remain important, the sport’s commercial strategy has evolved dramatically in response to changing consumer behaviour and digital engagement.

The emergence of social media, streaming platforms, celebrity culture, and documentary programming has transformed Formula 1 into a mainstream entertainment property. The success of Netflix’s Drive to Survive accelerated this transition, introducing Formula 1 to younger audiences and expanding its appeal beyond traditional motorsport fans.

Consequently, Formula 1 teams have become lifestyle brands in their own right. Their logos, colour schemes, racing liveries, merchandise, digital content, and driver personalities represent valuable intellectual property assets capable of generating substantial revenue through commercial exploitation.

Luxury brands have recognized this opportunity. Formula 1 embodies many of the values associated with luxury goods: performance, exclusivity, innovation, craftsmanship, and prestige. Unsurprisingly, sport has become an increasingly attractive platform for luxury brand partnerships and fashion collaborations.

Intellectual Property as the Engine of Formula 1’s Commercial Success

The modern Formula 1 economy is fundamentally an intellectual property economy.

Virtually every commercially valuable element of the sport is protected through one or more forms of intellectual property rights.

Trademark Protection

Trademarks protect team names, logos, race event names, merchandise branding, sponsor identifiers, slogans, and visual branding elements.

For Formula 1 teams, trademarks are among their most valuable assets. They enable rights holders to control commercial use, prevent unauthorized exploitation, and maintain brand distinctiveness across global markets.

The value of these trademarks extends far beyond motorsport. Team marks frequently appear on apparel, watches, footwear, accessories, collectibles, and luxury products sold worldwide.

Copyright Protection

Copyright protects race broadcasts, promotional campaigns, advertising materials, digital content, documentaries, photographs, social media content, and merchandising artwork.

As Formula 1 increasingly relies upon content-driven engagement, copyright ownership and licensing have become central components of commercial negotiations.

Design Rights

Fashion collaborations and luxury merchandise frequently involve protectable design elements.

The visual appearance of apparel, accessories, luggage, footwear, and collectibles associated with Formula 1 collaborations may be protected through registered or unregistered design rights, helping preserve exclusivity and prevent imitation.

Image and Personality Rights

Drivers have evolved into powerful personal brands whose names, signatures, likenesses, social media presence, and public personas possess significant commercial value.

Their identities are routinely licensed for advertising campaigns, endorsement deals, fashion collaborations, and luxury brand partnerships, making image rights an increasingly important component of Formula 1’s commercial ecosystem.

Licensing: Monetizing Formula 1 Beyond the Racetrack

Licensing remains one of the most effective methods through which Formula 1 intellectual property is commercialized.

Through licensing agreements, rights holders authorize third parties to use protected intellectual property in exchange for royalties, minimum guarantees, or revenue-sharing arrangements.

Typical licensing arrangements include:

• Fashion and apparel collections;
• Luxury watches and jewellery;
• Footwear and accessories;
• Toys and collectibles;
• Digital products and gaming content;
• Lifestyle merchandise; and
• Experiential retail activations.

From a legal perspective, licensing agreements must address:

• Scope of rights;
• Territory;
• Duration;
• Royalty structures;
• Quality-control obligations;
• Marketing approvals;
• Audit rights; and
• Enforcement responsibilities.

Quality-control provisions are particularly important. Trademark owners must exercise sufficient control over licensed products to preserve brand integrity and prevent dilution of trademark rights.

The success of Formula 1 licensing demonstrates how sporting intellectual property can be transformed into consumer products that generate revenue long after the chequered flag falls.

Luxury Partnerships in Practice: Formula 1’s Fashion Economy

The convergence of Formula 1 and luxury fashion is best illustrated through high-profile collaborations that extend well beyond traditional sponsorship.

Louis Vuitton and Formula 1

The partnership between Louis Vuitton and Formula 1 reflects the growing alignment between luxury branding and elite sporting events.

Louis Vuitton’s bespoke trophy trunks and event-related branding initiatives illustrate how luxury companies increasingly seek cultural relevance through association with prestigious sporting properties.

From an intellectual property perspective, such collaborations require sophisticated licensing arrangements governing trademark usage, co-branding rights, advertising permissions, approval procedures, and territorial restrictions.

The relationship demonstrates how luxury brands increasingly view Formula 1 as a storytelling platform rather than merely a sponsorship opportunity.

TAG Heuer and Red Bull Racing

The collaboration between TAG Heuer and Red Bull Racing exemplifies the evolution of sponsorship into long-term strategic partnership.

The relationship extends beyond logo placement to encompass product integration, hospitality programmes, digital content creation, athlete endorsements, and global marketing campaigns.

Legally, such partnerships require detailed provisions addressing trademark licences, image rights, exclusivity obligations, content ownership, and reputation management.

Tommy Hilfiger and Mercedes

The long-standing association between Tommy Hilfiger and Mercedes illustrates how Formula 1 teams have become fashion platforms.

Through co-branded apparel, retail campaigns, and lifestyle marketing initiatives, Formula 1 branding is transformed into consumer fashion products.

These arrangements involve complex intellectual property considerations concerning trademark ownership, product approvals, merchandising rights, design protection, and advertising permissions.

Prada and the America’s Cup: A Useful Comparison

Although outside motorsport, Prada’s involvement with the America’s Cup offers valuable comparative insights.

Both Formula 1 and elite sailing have evolved into intellectual property ecosystems where sporting participation serves as a foundation for broader commercial exploitation through merchandising, hospitality, licensing, content production, and luxury branding.

The comparison highlights a broader trend: elite sports are increasingly being transformed into luxury lifestyle properties through sophisticated intellectual property management.

Driver Image Rights: Formula 1’s Most Valuable Fashion Asset

One of the most significant developments within Formula 1’s commercial ecosystem is the rise of drivers as independent lifestyle and fashion brands.

Historically, a driver’s commercial value was linked primarily to athletic performance. Today, drivers possess immense influence across social media, luxury marketing, fashion campaigns, and entertainment platforms.

Few examples illustrate this evolution better than Lewis Hamilton.

Hamilton has successfully positioned himself beyond motorsport through collaborations with luxury fashion brands, appearances at international fashion weeks, editorial campaigns, and advocacy initiatives relating to diversity and sustainability. His influence demonstrates how Formula 1 drivers can transcend sport and become global fashion personalities.

The commercial exploitation of driver image rights may include:

• Luxury fashion campaigns;
• Watch endorsements;
• Fragrance partnerships;
• Social media advertising;
• Personal merchandise collections;
• Capsule fashion collaborations; and
• Brand ambassador agreements.

From a legal perspective, image rights transactions frequently involve overlapping rights relating to trademarks, publicity rights, copyrights, endorsements, and contractual restrictions.

As drivers become increasingly valuable marketing assets, sponsorship agreements often require separate negotiations regarding social media obligations, campaign participation, personal appearances, and advertising usage rights.

In many cases, a driver’s personal brand may become as commercially valuable as the team for which they compete.

Sponsorship Agreements: Intellectual Property at the Core

Despite their marketing appearance, Formula 1 sponsorship agreements are fundamentally intellectual property transactions.

Sponsors typically receive limited rights to use team trademarks, logos, visual assets, and, where applicable, driver image rights.

Several provisions are particularly significant.

Ownership of Intellectual Property

Parties must clearly determine ownership of newly created content, campaign materials, product designs, and marketing assets.

Failure to address ownership may lead to disputes regarding future exploitation and commercialization.

Brand Usage Controls

Luxury brands devote considerable resources to preserving their reputation and visual identity.

Accordingly, sponsorship agreements typically contain extensive approval mechanisms governing advertising materials, packaging, product launches, media communications, and social media campaigns.

Exclusivity

Sponsors often negotiate category exclusivity rights preventing competitors from securing comparable commercial relationships within the same team or event ecosystem.

Morality Clauses

Given the reputational sensitivity of luxury fashion and global sport, agreements frequently include termination provisions linked to conduct that may damage brand value or public perception.

These clauses have become increasingly important in an era where reputational crises can emerge and spread rapidly through digital media.

Ambush Marketing and the Protection of Event Intellectual Property

As Formula 1’s commercial value has increased, so too have attempts by non-sponsors to create unauthorized associations with races, teams, and drivers.

This practice commonly known as ambush marketing epresents one of the most significant threats to event-related intellectual property.

Ambush marketing may involve:

• Unauthorized promotional campaigns;
• Misleading sponsorship claims;
• Social media activities implying official affiliation;
• Event-themed advertising;
• Promotional activities near race venues; and
• Strategic use of imagery designed to evoke Formula 1 associations.

The challenge is that many ambush marketing campaigns are carefully structured to avoid direct trademark infringement while still benefiting from public perceptions of association.

To address these risks, Formula 1 stakeholders rely upon a combination of legal mechanisms.

Trademark Enforcement

Registered trademarks remain the primary tool for preventing unauthorized commercial associations and protecting event branding.

Contractual Restrictions

Race organizers impose extensive contractual obligations on venue operators, suppliers, hospitality partners, broadcasters, and commercial participants.

Passing Off and Unfair Competition Actions

Where advertisers create misleading impressions of sponsorship or endorsement, rights holders may rely upon passing off, unfair competition, or false advertising claims.

Digital Enforcement

The rise of influencer marketing and social media has created new enforcement challenges.

Formula 1 rights holders increasingly monitor online content, influencer campaigns, marketplaces, and digital advertising to identify unauthorized commercial associations.

As artificial intelligence and virtual advertising technologies continue to develop, protecting event intellectual property is likely to become even more complex. 

Counterfeiting and Brand Protection

Commercial success inevitably attracts counterfeit activity.

Formula 1 merchandise, luxury collaborations, and limited-edition fashion collections are frequent targets for counterfeiters operating through online marketplaces and cross-border distribution networks.

To protect brand value, rights holders employ a multi-layered enforcement strategy that includes:

• Trademark registrations;
• Customs recordal programmes;
• Domain name recovery actions;
• Marketplace monitoring;
• Social media enforcement;
• Private investigations; and
• Strategic litigation.

For luxury brands, enforcement is not merely about revenue recovery. Counterfeit products undermine exclusivity, damage reputation, and dilute the prestige upon which luxury branding depends. 

Conclusion

Formula 1’s evolution from a sporting competition into a global fashion and lifestyle platform offers one of the most compelling examples of intellectual property commercialization in the modern economy.

Licensing programmes, sponsorship agreements, driver endorsements, luxury collaborations, and digital content initiatives have transformed Formula 1 into an ecosystem where trademarks, copyrights, designs, and image rights generate substantial value beyond the racetrack.

The partnerships between Louis Vuitton and Formula 1, TAG Heuer and Red Bull Racing, Tommy Hilfiger and Mercedes, and the broader comparisons with luxury sporting properties such as Prada’s America’s Cup involvement illustrate how intellectual property now sits at the centre of modern sports marketing.

As the boundaries between fashion, entertainment, technology, and sport continue to blur, Formula 1 demonstrates that the future of luxury branding is not merely about products; it is about creating, licensing, protecting, and monetizing intellectual property-driven experiences.

In the Formula 1 fashion economy, speed may capture attention, but intellectual property ultimately drives value.

The post Luxury at 300 km/h: Licensing, Sponsorship and Brand Protection in Formula 1’s Fashion Economy appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

On paper, law and fashion seem to belong in two different worlds. Law is built on hierarchy, precision and precedent. Fashion is built on desire, excitement and taste. But each, in its own way, is a closed world with its own language, gatekeepers and unspoken rules. 

For Hoang, fashion did not present itself as a clear career path. “Until you are in it, unless you have access to it, or your family knows someone, or your parents know someone, it does not feel like a traditional career path,” she tells me. “It is quite opaque to people who are not already in it.”

I caught up with Hoang to discuss the law degree before the label, the making of ANNA QUAN, and the discipline behind a brand that appears effortless.

On Studying Law

You studied law and journalism before moving into fashion. What initially drew you to law?

I kind of fell into it. It was a good base to learn about the world. If you want to be a writer, understanding how the world is structured is helpful. That was something else I was interested in. I thought law would be exciting because you would meet new people and do different things.

Was there a point where you realised that if you wanted to pursue fashion instead of law, you had to do it then, rather than later?

My husband was the one who said, “If you really want to pursue this, you have to do it now, because the money is going to get too good if you do not. You will go into the job, the money will become too good, and you will never come back and do the thing you want to do.”

Did your legal background shape the way you approached building the brand?

Building the brand was more about articulating and building out product and a brand feeling. I do not think that came from studying law or becoming a solicitor. It came more from life experience. I knew I wanted to create a brand that filled a gap for me and made me feel creatively fulfilled.

On Breaking into Fashion

How did you begin to research how to get into fashion?

I was in the third year of my law degree, and I thought to myself, “I really want to do this”. I was not sure what I would do once I finished law, but I knew I had always been drawn to fashion. 

I started applying for fashion internships while I was in law school, but people would say, “No, you are not right. You do not have the training.” Then someone who very kindly rejected me said, “You should go and do this course. This is the course you study if this is what you want to do.” 

That started the process. It was research 101: what is the course, what are the requirements, how do you get in, how many people do they accept, what other courses are available, and how do they compare?

How did you get into the fashion design course?

You could not just enrol. You had to be selected. The process involved a portfolio submission, a drawing exam, a design exam and an interview. The first threshold was the portfolio. If they liked the portfolio, you were selected to sit the exam. 

The exam had two parts. One was drawing, where you had to sketch what you saw. The second was to design a winter look and a summer look. Everyone was given the same fabrics to look at and touch, and then you had to go back and sketch a winter look and a summer look. 

After that, you did the interview. They would decide how you had performed in the other assessments, talk to you, and decide whether they thought you had potential.

How did you feel going through that process?

Firstly, I could not draw. Before I could even properly consider applying, I did drawing classes for a whole year. There were thousands of people applying for fewer than 100 places. At the time, it was very competitive to get in. It was not like going to a private fashion college where you pay money and get a diploma. It was selective. You could not pay your way in. 

It was more competitive than law school.

They needed to identify that you were a member of their tribe. Fashion can be very tribal. It is not a meritocracy. Marks mean nothing. Having a high ATAR means nothing. 

You could have a great portfolio, a great drawing, and a great design on paper, but if they did not think you were part of their tribe, you were not going to get in.

What do you mean when you say, “fashion can be very tribal”?

I think you had to know and get to know the right people, and understand who would be assessing you. For me, I had already been studying with one of the teachers who was one of the core decision-makers. He had seen a lot of my drawings over the year because he had been training me for the exam.

On leaving stability behind

What did it feel like stepping away from the more conventional legal career path?

When I was studying design, towards the end of it, a lot of my friends were becoming senior associates. One of them became a partner very young, at a top-tier firm. A lot of my friends became senior associates while I was still completing my studies.

How did that feel at the time?

I wish I could say I did not care, but I did feel a bit left behind. I was still a student, and I did not really have a career path. I knew I was going to finish, but I did not know whether I would have a successful career by the end of it, or even a stable one.

Some people said I was wasting my time. They thought it was a pipe dream and that I was wasting my talent. They probably do not remember saying that now.

Was there a turning point when you felt like you had ‘made it’?

I do not think so. People might think that because I go to Paris four times a year, and to New York, London and other places, and I do lots of different things. But I never really feel like, “I have finally made it.” There is always something else you want to do or explore.

On Building ANNA QUAN

When you first launched your label, what did you need to put in place from a business or legal perspective?

We incorporated a company and registered business names and things like that. My husband is a lawyer, so I made him do it. He purchased a shelf company, registered the company. His background is intellectual property, so trade marks, names and corporate structures were things he was already practising in at the time.

When I started my own label, it was separate from the brand I initially started with my business partner. I bought back her one share in the company, and then I changed the corporate name and the trading name. That was it.

What do you enjoy about running the business side of things?

The running of the business is interesting because you get to do lots of different things all the time. There is the creative part, and there is also a lot of putting out fires. You are doing something different every day, which is very stimulating. Maybe too stimulating sometimes, but it suits me.

What does a day in your life look like?

Today, for example, I had a meeting with my team about change management and AI implementation. This morning I did filming, walking people through the new collection and creating short-form content for organic and paid channels.

There was some graphic design work, then I had a three-hour design meeting on a resort collection. I am also looking at fabric swatches, designing silhouettes, sketching, merchandising, and dealing with wholesale issues, like what to do if shipments are delayed or what we are willing and able to provide within certain timelines.

On the future of ANNA QUAN

What is next for ANNA QUAN?

For now, I am looking at consolidation. There are changes around taxes, tariffs, logistics, and the way fashion operates with the advancement of technology. The other day, we received our first agentic sale, which we were not expecting. We now have people shopping agentically for clothing. So for us, it is about consolidating a lot of social, structural and technological change before trying to scale further.

Behind the Seams is a series by Chloe Lei that explores the paths of those who began in law before finding their way into fashion.

Through conversations with fashion founders, designers and creatives, the series offers a glimpse into what it really takes to step away from the conventional path and follow the pull of fashion.

The post Before the Label: Anna Hoang on the Making of ANNA QUAN appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

The Swatch x Audemars Piguet collaboration was never going to land quietly. The second those two names appeared in the same sentence, the internet did what it always does with luxury-adjacent drops: it projected desire, inflated expectations, and converted anticipation into a market before most people had even seen the product in person. Swatch x Ap’s Royal Pop collection launched on May 16 as a set of eight bioceramic pocket watches combining Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak design language with Swatch’s vintage POP concept, complete with hand-wound SISTEM51 movements, lanyards, and styling accessories.

That should have settled the matter.

It did not.

For a large part of the audience, “AP x Swatch” still read as shorthand for one thing: a relatively accessible gateway into Royal Oak symbolism. That expectation, even if not fully grounded in the product description, was powerful enough to create queues, panic, and immediate resale behaviour around a release that was expressly framed as a pocket-watch-style object rather than a standard wristwatch.

Swatch itself warned of crowd management issues, capped purchases at one watch per person per store per day, and noted that in some markets, queues beyond a certain size might not be accepted.

And that is where this stops being merely a watch story and becomes a fashion law story.

Because the most interesting part of Royal Pop is what people tried to do with the product once they got close to it: flip it, reframe it, upgrade it, and in some cases, imagine turning it into something commercially more desirable than what Swatch had actually sold.

That afterlife matters. In legal terms, the line between legitimate resale and problematic remarketing is often much thinner than consumers assume.

The Misunderstanding was Cultural

On paper, the product was clearly described. Swatch called the collection a run of “statement-making pocket watches designed for endless creative styling,” available only at selected stores, with accessories sold online. The watches came in Lépine and Savonnette formats, were designed to be worn or displayed in different ways, and were positioned as a playful collision of Pop Art, Royal Oak references, and Swatch’s own archive.

But product descriptions do not operate in a vacuum.

In the luxury and fashion ecosystem, consumers often respond not to what a product technically is, but to what the brand pairing culturally signifies.

That is what made the reaction so intense. The object may have been a pocket watch, but the desire around it was wristwatch desire: recognisability, status, scarcity, and proximity to an otherwise unreachable icon.

That gap between product reality and consumer expectation is important because it explains why the resale market kicked in so quickly. When a product disappoints a practical use case but still carries symbolic value, it often becomes even more attractive as a collectible or speculative asset. It no longer needs to function in the way people originally imagined. It only needs to retain enough brand heat to command a premium.

Hype is not separate from the resale economy. It feeds it.

That is exactly what happened here. Reports following the launch described significant secondary-market activity, with pieces and even full sets appearing quickly on resale platforms at prices far above retail. Reuters reported that the launch triggered a consumer frenzy as resale prices climbed, while other coverage noted that a full set of eight Royal Pop models sold for more than five times on the secondary market. Other reports said people lined up in major cities, and some aftermarket accessories were already being sold to turn the pocket-watch-style pieces into wristwatches.

This exposes a basic truth about contemporary drop culture: hype is emotional energy, but it is also infrastructure for profit.

Scarcity, real or perceived, creates a chain reaction. First come the fans, then the flippers, then the content creators, then the aftermarket sellers offering ways to “improve” or reinterpret the product. The object enters circulation almost immediately as both a cultural sign and a monetisable asset.

So asking whether Royal Pop is “real hype” or just “money-making” misses the point. In modern fashion and luxury drops, those two things are often inseparable.

Hype is what gives the resale economy its speed. The resale economy is what gives hype its measurable price. One legitimises the other.

From a legal standpoint, simple resale of a genuine product is usually not the problem. Once a branded good is lawfully sold, the buyer can generally resell it. That is the logic underlying the principle of exhaustion, also known in some systems as the first sale. The trademark owner’s control over distribution is not limitless after an authorised sale. But exhaustion is not a blank cheque. It protects resale, not every commercial reinvention of the product.

Reselling is one thing. Re-engineering brand meaning is another.

This is where fashion law starts to get much more interesting.

The moment a reseller or customiser goes beyond simply selling the original item and begins altering it, repackaging it, or presenting it as a commercially enhanced version, the legal analysis shifts.

The question is no longer only whether the underlying product is authentic. The question becomes whether the altered product is being marketed in a way that creates confusion, false association, or unfair commercial advantage built on the original brand’s goodwill.

That distinction has been tested directly in the watch industry. In a landmark 2024 decision, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court addressed a dispute involving Rolex and Artisans de Genève, a company known for customising luxury watches. The Court drew a careful line: customisation carried out at the request of an owner for the owner’s personal use could continue, but marketing or advertising modified branded watches in commerce without the trademark owner’s consent was treated as legally problematic.

The principle behind that ruling is not difficult to understand. A customer may have broad freedom to alter a product already owned, and a service provider may, in some cases, help facilitate that alteration. But when a business acquires branded products, modifies them, and then puts them back on the market while still trading on the original brand identity, the conduct starts to look less like private personalisation and more like unauthorised commercial exploitation of a trademark.

That is precisely why Royal Pop is such a useful case study. If an individual buyer chooses to experiment with straps, housings, or alternative ways to wear the watch for personal use, that is one category of conduct. If aftermarket sellers begin buying units, adapting them into wristwatch-style products, and marketing them in a way that leans heavily on “AP x Swatch” cachet, that is another.

The first sits closer to personal use. The second edges toward remarketing.

Customisation is where resale culture enters the legal grey zone

The appeal of customisation is easy to understand. It promises individuality in a market built on mass desire. It lets consumers believe they are not merely buying a hyped object but finishing it, elevating it, or making it more truly their own.

In fashion terms, it sounds creative. In commercial terms, it sounds like value addition. In legal terms, it can become messy very quickly.

The law does not treat all customisation equally. A private one-off service requested by a product owner is very different from a repeat commercial model built around modified branded goods. Courts and trademark owners are especially sensitive to the second model because it risks creating confusion over source, approval, collaboration, or sponsorship. Even where no one literally claims that the original brand authorised the modification, the overall presentation can still suggest endorsement.

That is why language matters so much in resale and aftermarket spaces. A seller may think it is harmless to market a modified Royal Pop as a more wearable, more functional, or more desirable version of the original. But if the marketing leans on Audemars Piguet prestige, Royal Oak associations, or the aura of the official collaboration while simultaneously changing the product’s form, it begins to extract commercial value from the trademark in a new way. That is still resale, but it also becomes the creation of a downstream product identity using someone else’s brand equity as fuel.

And this is exactly the kind of behaviour that fashion law has to watch closely.

In sectors driven by visual codes and symbolic value, infringement disputes rarely arise only from direct copying. They often arise from proximity; being close enough to a famous mark to borrow its cultural force while insisting the use is technically independent.

The real lesson of The Royal Pop

The Swatch x Audemars Piguet release says something larger about where fashion, watches, and culture are now. Ownership is no longer always the endpoint of desire. For a growing part of the market, acquiring the object is simply the first step in a longer chain of monetisation: resale, content, collecting, modification, or conversion into something else. The product is valuable not only for what it is, but for what it allows people to do next.

That is why Royal Pop became bigger than its own design brief almost immediately. Swatch introduced a playful pocket-watch-style collaboration with strong archival references and strict purchase controls. The market responded by treating it as a scarcity event, a status object, and a possible raw material for further commercial creativity.

And that is where the law draws its line. Buyers can generally resell what they lawfully own. They may, in some circumstances, customise it for personal use. But once the product is pushed back into commerce in modified form, supported by branding cues that trade on the original mark’s reputation, the legal comfort disappears.

In that sense, Royal Pop is a reminder that the most valuable thing in fashion and luxury is rarely the object alone. It is the brand meaning attached to it.

And in the resale economy, everyone wants a share of that meaning; fans, flippers, customisers, and platforms alike.

The law’s job is to decide how far they can go before enthusiasm becomes exploitation.

The post The Royal Pop Resale Machine: What the Swatch x AP Frenzy Says About IP, Hype, and the Business of Flipping appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

Today, a gown worn for ten minutes on the Met Gala carpet can become a “budget recreation” on social media before the original collection even reaches retail stores. Instagram reels, TikTok edits, Pinterest mood boards, and “Met Gala on Amazon” videos now fuel a parallel fashion marketplace driven less by originality and more by speed, visibility, and consumer recall.

The modern fashion dupe economy is no longer operating in secrecy. It is functioning openly, strategically and at an industrial scale.

And that raises an increasingly important legal question:

When does inspiration become infringement?

The Rise of the “Legal Dupe”

Unlike counterfeit products, most modern fashion dupes do not carry fake logos or falsely claim affiliation with luxury brands. Instead, they imitate the overall aesthetic of high-fashion products while carefully avoiding direct trademark infringement.

This distinction matters.

A counterfeit attempts to deceive consumers into believing a product is genuine. A dupe, however, operates in a legally grey space. It borrows silhouettes, colour palettes, embellishments, textures, styling cues, and overall visual impressions while avoiding the exact identifiers protected under traditional intellectual property laws.

In many cases, the product is intentionally marketed as “inspired by” luxury fashion rather than pretending to be luxury fashion itself.

This is precisely why fast fashion companies have become extraordinarily sophisticated at navigating the boundaries of intellectual property law.

Fashion’s IP Problem: The Law Was Never Built for Viral Trends

Fashion occupies an unusually complicated position within intellectual property law.

In India, there is no standalone legislation specifically designed to comprehensively protect fashion designs. As a result, designers rely on a patchwork of protections under copyright law, design law, trademark law, and passing off remedies.

Each offers only partial protection.

Under the Copyright Act, 1957, artistic works such as sketches, prints, embroidery, and surface artwork may receive copyright protection. However, Section 15(2) creates a significant limitation: once a design capable of registration under the Designs Act is industrially reproduced more than fifty times, copyright protection may cease.

For fashion businesses, this creates a commercial paradox. The more successful a design becomes, the weaker its copyright protection may eventually become.

The Delhi High Court addressed this issue in Ritika Private Limited v. Biba Apparels Private Limited, where garment patterns and prints lost copyright protection after crossing the industrial reproduction threshold.

The Designs Act 2000 offers protection for novel visual features such as shape, configuration, pattern, and ornamentation. However, fashion moves faster than registration systems. By the time a designer files an application, runway images and celebrity photographs may already have circulated globally online, potentially affecting novelty requirements.

This legal gap is exactly what allows the dupe economy to thrive.

Fast fashion businesses make subtle modifications to garments while preserving the overall commercial impression of the original design. Legally, this becomes difficult territory because intellectual property law traditionally protects specific expression rather than broad aesthetic inspiration.

Why Trademark Law Is Becoming Fashion’s Strongest Weapon

As design protection becomes harder to enforce, luxury brands are increasingly relying on trademark law, trade dress protection, and brand identity enforcement.

Today, fashion value is often concentrated not merely in the garment itself, but in recognisable identity markers:

• signature colour combinations,
• stitching patterns,
• packaging,
• monograms,
• bottle or accessory architecture,
• store layouts,
• campaign aesthetics,
• and even digital presentation styles.

In the age of social media, consumers frequently identify sources not through labels, but through visual familiarity.

This is where trade dress and brand identity become commercially powerful.

The Delhi High Court’s decision in Christian Louboutin SAS v. Nakul Bajaj reinforced the growing responsibility of digital marketplaces in facilitating infringing or counterfeit sales. But modern dupes often avoid direct trademark liability altogether by carefully removing logos while retaining the recognisable “look and feel” of luxury fashion.

That creates a difficult enforcement challenge:
The product may appear ethically questionable while remaining technically lawful.

The AI Problem: Fashion Duplication at Algorithmic Speed

Artificial intelligence has intensified this problem dramatically.

AI systems can now analyse runway photographs, identify trending aesthetics, predict consumer preferences, and generate design-adjacent products almost instantly. Some platforms are already experimenting with AI-generated “celebrity-inspired” shopping recommendations based on viral fashion content.

AI no longer merely accelerates copying.

It industrialises aesthetic prediction.

The Met Gala 2026 demonstrated this in real time. Within hours of the event:

• AI-generated celebrity outfit recreations flooded social media,
• digital “try-on” edits went viral,
• and online marketplaces began advertising “Met Gala-inspired” collections almost immediately.

Even celebrities who did not attend the event became part of the digital fashion cycle through AI-generated imagery circulating online.

This raises entirely new legal questions around:

• authorship,
• originality,
• personality rights,
• digital replicas,
• algorithmic inspiration,
• and ownership of AI-generated fashion outputs.

Fashion, Celebrity Identity, and Personality Rights

Modern fashion is no longer just about garments. It is deeply tied to celebrity identity, influencer culture, and digital persona.

A celebrity’s look today is a monetizable commercial asset.

When brands imitate not just clothing but also styling, poses, makeup aesthetics, campaign moods, or recognizable celebrity associations, personality rights concerns may arise.

Indian courts have increasingly recognized such protections in cases including Titan Industries Ltd. v. Ramkumar Jewellers and Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India.

As AI-generated likenesses and digitally recreated appearances become more common, personality rights may become one of the most important legal battlegrounds in fashion and entertainment law.

The Real Shift: Fashion Is Moving From Product Protection to Memory Protection

The larger issue is this:

Luxury fashion today is no longer competing only on craftsmanship. It is competing for recognisability within seconds of a social-media scroll.

The “source” of a fashion product may no longer be defined solely by its label. Increasingly, it is defined by how deeply the brand has occupied consumer memory.

This explains why modern fashion disputes are gradually shifting beyond conventional trademark battles into areas such as:

• trade dress,
• experiential branding,
• digital discoverability,
• algorithmic visibility,
• influencer association,
• and platform dominance.

In many ways, consumer memory itself is becoming the most valuable territory brands are trying to protect.

The Way Forward: What Fashion Brands and Fashion Law Teams Must Now Prioritise

The future of fashion protection cannot rely only on traditional registration systems. Fashion businesses and legal teams must evolve alongside technology and digital commerce.

Some critical priorities now include:

1. Build Protectable Brand Ecosystems

Brands should focus not only on logos, but also on trade dress, packaging, signature visual identity, colour schemes, and distinctive digital presentation.

2. Invest in Early Design and Trademark Strategy

Fast-moving collections require faster filing strategies, coordinated international filings, and aggressive portfolio management.

3. Strengthen Online Monitoring and Marketplace Enforcement

Fashion brands must actively monitor:

• marketplaces,
• social media platforms,
• AI-generated content,
• influencer collaborations,
• and keyword-driven infringement activity.

Online enforcement can no longer be reactive.

4. Prepare for AI-Driven Fashion Risks

Fashion companies should begin developing internal AI policies concerning:

• AI-assisted design creation,
• ownership of generated outputs,
• licensing risks,
• and use of celebrity likenesses or prompts.

5. Treat Personality Rights as Commercial Assets

Celebrity collaborations, campaign identities, and influencer aesthetics should be contractually and strategically protected as part of broader brand enforcement programmes.

6. Think Beyond India

Fashion disputes today are inherently cross-border. A design uploaded in Paris may be replicated in Shenzhen, marketed through Dubai, and sold to consumers in Mumbai within days. Enforcement strategies, therefore, need international coordination from the outset.

Conclusion

The “Met Gala effect” reflects a much larger transformation within the fashion industry.

Fashion is no longer moving at seasonal speed. It is moving at algorithmic speed.

And intellectual property law is struggling to keep pace.

The future of fashion disputes may no longer revolve around who designed first, but around who succeeded in embedding their identity deepest into consumer memory.

In the era of dupes, AI-generated aesthetics, and viral discoverability, exclusivity itself is being redefined.

The post Fast Fashion Dupes, AI, and the Met Gala Effect: Where Inspiration Ends, and Infringement Begins appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

Charleen Shavies of Alameda, California filed the proposed nationwide class action on April 24, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging Fashion Nova violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) by sending promotional messages before the federally permitted 8 AM start. The case is Shavies v. Fashion Nova, Inc. According to the complaint, each of the eight texts arrived in a 36-minute window during the summer of 2025 and linked back to fashionnova.com.

Shavies wants to represent every consumer in the country who received more than one Fashion Nova promotional text in any 12-month period over the last four years, with at least one text arriving before 8 AM local time. The TCPA, enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), allows statutory damages of up to $500 per message, or $1,500 per message if a court finds the conduct willful. With eight texts to one plaintiff and a class theory that could run into the millions, the math gets uncomfortable for Fashion Nova fast.

Fashion Nova has not formally responded to the complaint.

The rule, in plain English

The TCPA was passed in 1991. The FCC implemented it through a regulation, 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200, that prohibits “telephone solicitations” to residential subscribers before 8 AM or after 9 PM local time. These windows are known in the industry as “quiet hours.” Text messages count as telephone solicitations under the FCC’s interpretation. The rule applies based on the time zone where the recipient is located, which is itself a litigation problem because cell phone area codes do not always match where someone actually is on a given morning.

This is not Fashion Nova’s first quiet-hours suit. As Troutman Amin’s Lexology coverage tracked through 2025, the company was hit with a similar TCPA action in Indiana over Memorial Day promotional texts. Fashion Nova obtained a stay in that case while the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decides whether SMS messages even qualify as “calls” under the TCPA’s do-not-call provisions.

Why every fashion brand running SMS marketing should care

Quiet-hours class actions are now one of the fastest-growing categories of consumer litigation in the country. As Solutions by Text reported, the first quarter of 2025 alone saw roughly 507 TCPA class actions filed, more than 112 percent higher than the same quarter in 2024. The Blacklist Alliance documented over 100 quiet-hours complaints filed by a single Florida law firm since November 2024, with cookie-cutter pleadings targeting e-commerce brands.

Fashion is a high-volume SMS marketing category. Drop alerts, flash sales, abandoned cart reminders, restock notifications. The standard playbook is to schedule sends across time zones and let the message go. If a single message lands at 7:58 AM Pacific because the brand miscalculated the recipient’s local time, the company has just bought itself a potential class action.

The Supreme Court angle the complaint does not flag

Here is where this case gets more interesting than the four corners of the filing suggest.

In June 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court decided McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates v. McKesson Corp. As Troutman Amin’s TCPAWorld analysis explained, McKesson held that district courts are no longer bound by FCC interpretations under the Hobbs Act. Combined with the 2024 decision in Loper Bright killing Chevron deference, federal trial courts now have meaningful authority to set aside FCC rules that Congress did not specifically authorize.

The quiet-hours rule was not written by Congress. The FCC promulgated it under its implied authority to implement the TCPA. That makes it the kind of agency rule district courts can now reexamine, and possibly invalidate.

There is a second defense layered on top. The TCPA defines “telephone solicitation” to exclude calls or messages sent with the recipient’s prior express invitation or permission. If a consumer signed up for Fashion Nova’s text club, the brand’s lawyers will argue, the messages are not solicitations at all and the quiet-hours rule never applies in the first place.

The Ecommerce Innovation Alliance has a petition pending before the FCC asking the agency to confirm exactly that. Comments closed in April 2025. No ruling has issued.

The practical reality

Most quiet-hours class actions do not go to verdict. They settle. As Troutman Amin observed in its post-McKesson analysis, the entire wave was structured for fast settlements rather than litigation on the merits, and the volume of suits put pressure on defendants to pay rather than fight.

That calculus is shifting. Brands with deep pockets and good outside counsel can now plausibly fight these cases by attacking the quiet-hours rule itself, citing the consent exclusion in the statute, and waiting for FCC guidance that may make the entire theory go away. Brands without those resources still face the choice that has driven settlements for the past 18 months: pay six or seven figures to make the class action disappear, or spend the same amount defending a case where the law is genuinely unsettled.

For Fashion Nova specifically, the suit is one more line item on an active legal docket. The retailer is also defending the $5.15 million ADA website accessibility settlement that the U.S. Department of Justice asked the court to reject in February 2026, calling the deal a windfall for plaintiffs’ attorneys with little value for blind consumers.

What changes for fashion brands operating SMS programs

Three things.

First, area-code-as-location is the floor of compliance, not the ceiling. Brands sending texts at 7:55 AM Pacific to a 415 number where the recipient is actually traveling on the East Coast are giving plaintiffs’ firms a target. The defensible standard is to schedule based on area code AND build a buffer (most TCPA defense lawyers now recommend 9 AM to 8 PM windows as the practical safe zone).

Second, the consent record is the lawsuit defense. If a brand cannot produce written records of how, when, and on what platform a consumer opted into texts, the prior-express-permission defense to the quiet-hours rule becomes much harder to assert.

Third, state mini-TCPAs are stricter. Florida, Oklahoma, Maryland, and Washington have state telemarketing statutes with narrower windows or additional Sunday prohibitions. Compliance with the federal rule does not buy compliance with the state rules.

The next move is Fashion Nova’s. The complaint was filed April 24. A response is expected within 21 to 60 days depending on service, with a likely motion to stay pending the Seventh Circuit ruling on whether texts even count as TCPA calls. The case docket is Shavies v. Fashion Nova, Inc., N.D. Cal.

SOURCES CITED:

1. Claim Depot — “Fashion Nova accused of texting shoppers before federal quiet hours in new class action lawsuit” (May 5, 2026) — https://www.claimdepot.com/cases/fashion-nova-class-action-alleges-early-morning-texts-violated-federal-quiet-hours-rules
2. National Law Review (Troutman Amin) — “Stylish TCPA Move: Fashion Nova and Shein Obtain Stays of Proceedings Pending Seventh Circuit Ruling on Whether Texts Are Calls” (Nov 5, 2025) — https://natlawreview.com/article/stylish-tcpa-move-fashion-nova-and-shein-obtain-stays-proceedings-pending-seventh
3. Privacy World (Squire Patton Boggs) — “New Class Action Threat: TCPA Quiet Hours and Marketing Messages” (March 2025) — https://www.privacyworld.blog/2025/03/new-class-action-threat-tcpa-quiet-hours-and-marketing-messages/
4. Solutions by Text — “TCPA Quiet Hours: Rising 2025 Enforcement Risks Explained” (Nov 24, 2025) — https://solutionsbytext.com/tcpa-quiet-hours-enforcement-2025/amp/
5. Mintz — “FCC Seeks Comment on Petitions Focused on Quiet Hour and Utility Robocalling Rules” (March 27, 2025) — https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2776/2025-03-27-telephone-and-texting-compliance-news-regulatory-update
6. Blacklist Alliance — “Beware the TCPA Quiet Hour: A New Wave of Litigation” (March 19, 2025) — https://www.blacklistalliance.com/blog/beware-the-tcpa-quiet-hour-a-new-wave-of-litigation
7. National Law Review — “Wave of Litigation Ended? Are the TCPA’s Quiet Hour Rules Dead After Friday’s Supreme Court Ruling?” (June 23, 2025) — https://natlawreview.com/article/wave-litigation-ended-are-tcpas-quiet-hour-rules-dead-after-fridays-supreme-court
8. Law Office of Lainey Feingold — “5.15 Million Dollar Settlement in California Web Accessibility Class Action” (updated Feb 10, 2026) — https://www.lflegal.com/2025/10/fashion-nova-settlement/

The post Fashion Nova Hit With TCPA Class Action Over Pre-8 AM Marketing Texts appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

The Devil Wears Prada franchise, across both its iterations and with escalating candour in the second, has never been, at its legal core, a story about fashion. It is a study in how certain industries construct what we might call zones of extra-legality: not lawless spaces, but spaces where the ordinary grammar of employment, intellectual property, and fiduciary obligation operates in a register so attenuated as to be effectively ornamental. What the fashion industry achieved, over the second half of the twentieth century with remarkable legislative and judicial complicity, was the consecration of the creative director as a figure who is simultaneously an employee, an author, a brand asset, and an institutional sovereign, categories whose legal incompatibility is resolved not through doctrinal synthesis but through deliberate ambiguity maintained across contract law, IP law, and labour regulation simultaneously.

This is the argument that fashion law scholarship has circled without landing: Miranda Priestly is not an aberration within a system. She is the system’s most legible expression.

The Author-Function and Its Proprietorial Distortions

Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in 1967. The fashion industry did not receive the memorandum, or rather, received it and filed a counter-submission. What the creative directorate model did, with a sophistication that most regulatory frameworks failed to anticipate, was to bifurcate the author-function: concentrating its reputational dimension in the named creative director while distributing its productive dimension across a largely uncredited, inadequately protected workforce. The result is an IP architecture of startling elegance and troubling consequence.

Under the work-for-hire doctrine as it operates across most major fashion jurisdictions, the creative output of design assistants, junior editors, stylists, and trend researchers vests immediately and entirely in the employing entity. This is unremarkable as a doctrinal matter. What is remarkable is the secondary effect: that the creative director, whose contribution is frequently curatorial and directional rather than generative, accumulates authorial prestige that the law then retroactively legitimises through trademark, trade dress, and moral rights frameworks that attach to the name rather than to demonstrable creative origination. The house of Runway, to pursue the franchise’s conceit, does not protect Miranda Priestly’s ideas. It protects the sign Miranda Priestly, which is a categorically different, and legally far more robust, form of protection.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 makes this structure visible in ways the original could only imply. The sequel’s interest in succession, in the question of who inhabits the authority that Miranda’s name has accumulated, is less a character study than an inadvertent treatise on the personality rights of institutional brands. When the question the film cannot quite bring itself to answer directly is whether Miranda’s authority is transferable, it is, without intending to, asking whether the sovereign exception is personal or structural. The answer, from Agamben and from the fashion industry’s actual contractual practice, is that it is always structural. The exception precedes the individual who inhabits it.

Fiduciary Silence and the Ethics of Creative Exploitation

There is a doctrine in corporate law, applied with considerable flexibility and occasional incoherence, called the duty of loyalty. It holds that those in positions of authority over others bear not merely contractual obligations but something approaching a fiduciary obligation: an affirmative duty whose breach cannot be contracted away. Fashion law has, with some notable exceptions in the context of designer non-competes and trade secret litigation, largely failed to interrogate whether the creative directorate relationship gives rise to anything resembling fiduciary character.

This failure is consequential. The relationship between Miranda Priestly and her assistants, as both films construct it, is not simply an employment relationship in the conventional sense. It is a relationship in which the employer exerts authority not merely over the labour performed but over the professional identity of the person performing it. Andrea Sachs is not merely being asked to complete tasks; she is being asked to reconstitute herself, her aesthetic sensibility, her social relations, her relationship to her own time, as instruments of Miranda’s institutional project. The law has a name for relationships of this character when they arise in other contexts. In the mentor-protégé structures of medicine, law, and finance, courts have occasionally been willing to find that the power differential and the scope of influence create obligations that exceed the contractual. Fashion has, with impressive consistency, avoided this analysis entirely.

The doctrinal reason is not difficult to locate: the persistent characterisation of fashion work as aspiration rather than labour. The cultural discourse surrounding the industry, which the franchise both critiques and reproduces, frames proximity to creative power as a privilege whose costs are naturally borne by the one who seeks it. This framing does not emerge from nowhere. It is constructed and maintained through specific rhetorical practices, through the language of opportunity and access and mentorship that has historically inoculated fashion employment relationships against the fiduciary analysis that their actual structure might otherwise invite.

The Exception as Legal Technology

What Schmitt understood, and what the fashion industry intuited without requiring the theoretical apparatus, is that the exception is not the failure of the norm. It is the norm’s most powerful tool. The creative director who operates outside ordinary accountability does not thereby undermine the legal system that governs the industry. She confirms it by demonstrating that the system is capacious enough to contain and to legitimate the concentration of authority that her position represents.

The legal technology through which this is achieved is neither simple nor unsophisticated. It operates across at least three registers simultaneously. In contract law, the personal service nature of creative employment is deployed to restrict worker mobility through non-competes while simultaneously denying workers the relational protections that the personal nature of the engagement might otherwise generate. In IP law, the work-for-hire framework captures creative output upward while moral rights frameworks, where they exist, vest in the employing entity rather than the individual author. In employment law, the at-will character of most fashion employment, combined with the industry’s structural dependence on informal networks of recommendation and reputation, creates a disciplinary apparatus that operates largely outside the formal adjudicative machinery that employment law nominally provides.

The cumulative effect is a workforce that is, in the technical legal sense, extensively protected and, in any practical sense, largely without recourse. Miranda Priestly operates within this system not because she transcends it but because the system was designed, through decades of contractual practice, legislative lobbying, and judicial deference, to produce exactly the kind of authority she exercises. The Devil Wears Prada 2’s particular contribution to this analysis is its suggestion that this authority survives even its nominal holder, that the exception has become so institutionalised as to be self-reproducing. That is not a fashion story. That is a constitutional one.

Towards a Jurisprudence of the Atelier

Fashion law, as an academic discipline with genuine ambitions, must eventually confront the question it has been too polite, or perhaps too implicated, to pose directly: whether the legal frameworks governing creative industries are describing a power structure or producing one. The franchise, for all its considerable pleasures, does the discipline the service of making this question impossible to avoid.

The creative directorate is not a natural phenomenon that law has struggled to categorise. It is a legal construction, assembled from specific doctrinal choices across multiple bodies of law, maintained through the active participation of transactional lawyers, IP practitioners, and employment counsel who have, collectively, built the juridical infrastructure that makes Miranda Priestly possible. The question of whether that infrastructure is defensible, whether the exceptional authority it generates is proportionate to any legitimate interest the law might recognise, is one that the discipline has the analytical tools to address and, thus far, a conspicuous reluctance to deploy.

The devil, it turns out, does not merely wear Prada. She wears, with considerably more structural consequence, the architecture of her own legal impunity. And it fits her perfectly.

That’s all.

The post The Exception Wears Prada appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

Why this matters now

Generative AI has made it easy to create convincing fake audio, images, and videos of public figures, which means a celebrity’s “identity” can now be cloned at scale. Taylor Swift’s move lands in that exact moment, and the sources frame it as a response to AI misuse, deepfakes, and synthetic impersonation.

That is why this story matters beyond pop culture. For lawyers, brands, and creators, it is a sign that celebrity-rights protection is shifting from a narrow focus on recordings and merchandise into a broader fight over identity as an asset.

What Swift appears to have filed

According to the reporting, Taylor Swift’s company, TAS Rights Management, filed three trademark applications in the United States: two sound marks and one image-based mark. The sound marks cover audio clips of Taylor Swift saying phrases such as “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and “Hey, it’s Taylor,” while the image file relates to a photo of Swift performing.

That detail is important because this is not a routine word-mark filing for a tour name or album title. It is a more novel attempt to protect elements of her persona that fans and consumers instantly associate with her.

Why trademark, not just copyright

This is the legal pivot that makes the move interesting. Copyright usually protects a fixed creative expression, such as a recording, a song, a photograph, or a video. But AI often creates outputs that imitate a person’s style or voice without directly copying one particular protected work.

Trademark law, by contrast, is about source identification and consumer confusion. The theory behind Taylor Swift’s filings is that if a phrase, sound, or visual cue has become strongly associated with her brand. Then, unauthorised use of something confusingly similar may create a trademark problem even where copyright law is less helpful.

The AI problem she is trying to solve

The practical issue is that AI can now generate celebrity-style content that looks and sounds close enough to fool audiences. That creates a market for fake endorsements, cloned voice clips, and deepfake videos that trade on a star’s reputation without permission.

Taylor Swift has also been one of the most visible targets of AI-generated misuse, which makes her a particularly fitting test case for how the law might adapt. The filings suggest a proactive strategy: create more legal hooks before misuse spreads further.

Why this is a smart IP move

From an intellectual property perspective, the move is clever for four reasons.

First, it gives Swift another enforcement tool. Even if a challenger argues that copyright does not neatly cover an AI-generated imitation, trademark claims may still be available if the use confuses consumers or suggests endorsement.

Second, it expands protection beyond the exact recording. A sound mark can help protect the association between a voice, a phrase, and a specific commercial identity, which matters in an era of voice cloning.

Third, it sends a deterrent message. Even if the legal theory is untested, the filing itself can chill would-be imitators and platforms that might otherwise assume the rights holder will not act.

Fourth, it fits Taylor Swift’s long history of brand control. She has filed many trademarks over the years for names, titles, and phrases connected to her music and business empire, so this is consistent with her larger IP strategy rather than a one-off stunt.

The legal limits

That said, this is not a guaranteed win in court. Trademark law has not yet fully settled how far it can go in protecting a celebrity’s voice or likeness against AI-generated replicas, so these filings are best seen as an aggressive, forward-looking test of the boundaries.

The biggest challenge will likely be proving infringement in a way that fits trademark doctrine, especially if the AI output is not an exact copy but only a close imitation. The legal fight may turn on confusion, association, and whether consumers think the output is endorsed or authorised.

There is also a bigger doctrinal point here: trademark law is not traditionally designed to police personhood, which is why publicity rights and copyright have usually done more of that work. Swift’s filing reflects a growing view that, in the AI era, those older categories leave gaps.

What this means for fashion law and celebrity branding

For fashion and entertainment lawyers, Swift’s move is a strong reminder that celebrity identity is now a multi-layered brand architecture. The name, voice, silhouette, imagery, and even signature phrasing can all become commercially valuable identifiers that deserve protection.

That is especially relevant in fashion, where likeness, styling, image rights, and endorsement value are constantly monetised. If AI can manufacture a fake celebrity front row appearance, a synthetic campaign voice-over, or an unauthorised avatar in a branded setting, the old legal tools may not be enough on their own.

In that sense, Taylor Swift is not only protecting herself but also stress-testing the system for every celebrity, model, and creator whose image is part of the commercial ecosystem.

The bigger IP lesson

The broader lesson is that the most valuable intellectual property in the AI era may be identity itself. As synthetic media becomes cheaper and more convincing, rights holders are likely to rely on a mix of trademark, copyright, contract, and publicity law to build a layered defence.

Swift’s filings are smart because they recognise that no single doctrine can do all the work. Trademark law may not solve every deepfake problem, but it can help establish a legal perimeter around the brands, cues, and associations that AI imitators are increasingly tempted to exploit.

For a figure like Taylor Swift, whose commercial identity is as carefully managed as her music catalogue, that kind of perimeter is not just strategic. It is increasingly necessary.

The post Taylor Swift’s Trademark Strategy Against Generative AI and the Future of Likeness Protection appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.