GI protection extends far beyond food. It shields traditional apparel, textiles, and handicrafts, making it particularly significant for the fashion industry and for communities like Nagaland whose cultural heritage lives in woven textiles.

A GI tag is important because it informs buyers that a product is truly linked to a certain location and that its value stems from the people, talents, and traditions of that region. In the food industry, take Darjeeling tea, Naga cucumber, and Chak-Hao black rice for example: these names are protected from being used to describe items that do not originate in those regions. More generally, rather than allowing it to be replicated and sold without attribution, GI tags help maintain authenticity, encourage local producers, and keep regional knowledge alive in the market.

The same protection applies to textiles: it safeguards the relationship between a woven product and the community that produced it. Fashion frequently borrows from local craft traditions, but the market does not always safeguard the creators of those designs, which makes that connection crucial.

That is why the Northeast is a crucial case to examine. Food and agricultural items like Naga Tree Tomato, Naga Sweet Cucumber, Khasi Mandarin, Chak-Hao black rice, Mizo chilli, and Assam Orthodox Tea are already GI-tagged in the area, demonstrating that GI is already a part of the Northeast’s legal identity protection.In addition to protecting identities, these GI tags help uphold customs and culture. Every product has a connection to particular farming methods, indigenous wisdom, and customs that have been passed down through the ages. The ancient methods of growing, harvesting, and using Chak-Hao black rice in ceremonies are also safeguarded when the rice is protected by a GI tag. The production and processing techniques that have shaped Assamese tea culture for generations are protected when Assam Orthodox Tea is granted GI protection. 

By linking a product to a specific place, GI gives the state legal ownership over the name, stops misuse by outsiders, and ensures the region is recognized as the source. This also helps preserve culture and traditions, because it protects the knowledge, skills, and community practices that make these products unique while keeping local producers in control of their identity.

However, the same reasoning holds true for textiles. Northeastern textiles are more than just clothing; they are symbols of place, community, tribe, and memory. Muga silk from Assam, Idu Mishmi textiles from Arunachal Pradesh, Chakhesang shawls from Nagaland, and the textile customs currently being sought for registration in Meghalaya and Nagaland are a few examples.

Here’s where fashion comes into play. A cloth enters the world of fashion as soon as it leaves the loom and is sold. A shawl, silk, or tribal weave is now a commodity, fashion, and trend rather than just a piece of heritage. Both opportunity and risk are created by this change. The opportunity is that GI can bring recognition, value, and market visibility to Northeast textiles, helping artisans earn better prices and gain wider respect. The risk is that once these textiles enter the fashion realm, the market often copies the designs without credit, splits the cultural meaning from the pattern, and sells them as ethnic prints or tribal-inspired fashion without benefiting the communities who created them.

GI can help Northeast textiles gain awareness, value, and recognition, but it also raises a bigger question: can the law protect not just a textile’s name, but the cultural meaning woven into it?

From heritage to commodity:  why Northeast textiles are disappearing from the market.

For generations, textiles across the Northeast were never just fabric sold in markets. They were cultural archives: woven with identity, rank, ritual, and ecological knowledge that passed through families and communities over time. 

In many Naga communities, a shawl carries more meaning than mere decoration. It signals a person’s lineage, achievements, and status within the community. It can indicate whether someone has participated in certain rituals, earned recognition, or belongs to a particular family line. When an elder weaves a cloth, they do not simply create a product; they embed memory, tradition, and identity into the pattern itself.

For many women in the Northeast, weaving functions as a form of language. It allows them to communicate without words and to pass down knowledge that might otherwise disappear. The motifs they select, the colours they use, and the techniques they repeat connect them to stories from the past, teachings from ancestors, and responsibilities to the community. A textile can serve as a wedding gift, a funeral marker, a festival symbol, or a treasure preserved in the home for generations.

To these communities, textiles are not merely art; they are part of their identity. Wearing a tribal shawl is like carrying their history on their shoulders, like holding their family’s legacy close. That is why when these textiles are copied and sold without context, it feels like more than just a design being taken. It feels like a story being stolen, a tradition being flattened, and a community being erased.

In Nagaland, shawls and handwoven cloth carry tribal meaning and social markers that signal belonging, status, and community memory rather than mere decoration, as shown in the Tribal Textiles of Nagaland and studies on Naga Shawls: Weaving Cultural Narratives and Tribal Identity. 

Across the region, textile motifs, colours, and weaving techniques reflect local ecology, gender roles, and ceremonial life, which makes them living traditions rather than static heritage artifacts.

However, these fabrics are increasingly regarded as commodities as they expand into larger markets, exhibitions, and fashion circuits. Outsiders find artistic inspiration in what was once a collective identity. Without acknowledgement, permission, or benefit-sharing, traditional patterns are replicated, simplified, and marketed as “ethnic prints” or “tribal-inspired” designs, a phenomenon documented in studies on cultural appropriation in textile and fashion design.  This is the same pattern observed with well-known GI items such as Champagne, Parmigiano Reggiano, and Roquefort. Champagne is protected by a GI that firmly links it to the Champagne region of France, guaranteeing that the name can only be applied to sparkling wine made there using particular techniques. No matter how similar the product is, no other producer of sparkling wine can refer to it as “Champagne.” However, businesses still profit from the Champagne aesthetic: its branding, its luxury association, its mystique. The cultural capital is borrowed without compensation to the region.

Similarly, Parmigiano Reggiano cheese is protected by GI, but knowledge of how to manufacture aged cheese, recipes, and procedures have been borrowed by other producers around the world. They mimic the cultural identity and offer comparable goods under different labels, even though they might not utilise the precise name. The same is true for Roquefort, which is associated with a particular area of France yet whose blue cheese-making heritage has been imitated and sold elsewhere.

The same is true for textiles in the Northeast. Without giving recognition to the tribe, a designer may reduce a Chakhesang shawl pattern and market it as “tribal-inspired.” Although the name “Chakhesang Shawl” is protected by the GI tag, the design can still be replicated and sold as something else. The cultural identity is extracted, repackaged, and sold, while the original community receives no benefit or recognition.

As a result, there is a legal void. The name of a cloth may be protected, but it is still possible to copy, sell, and wear the design that embodies the community’s identity without giving acknowledgement or payment.

When “Chakhesang Shawl from Nagaland” is protected by a GI tag, spurious claims are prevented and the term is linked to the location. However, this doesn’t stop designers from replicating the design and applying it to scarves, T-shirts, or handbags without restriction. The GI does not cover the design itself.

Logos and brand names have legal protection, but traditional weaving designs and the cultural knowledge embedded in them do not. A fashion brand can copy, modify, and market these designs without authorisation or benefit to the original community. A textile’s name can be recognised by the law, but its cultural significance, symbolic patterns, and collective knowledge are not protected. Even if a community is granted legal recognition for the name of their cloth, they still have no control over the design that embodies their identity. Today, GI and trademarks can safeguard the goods, but also expose the culture that underlies it.

The end effect is a subtle kind of cultural flattening: the textile’s cultural logic is eliminated, yet it is still physically identifiable.

This is the core legal problem. Indian trademark law protects logos and brand names, but it does not protect weaves, themes, or textile identity. As textiles become commodities, the law struggles to preserve cultural value while allowing markets to operate freely. The GI push for Nagaland textiles matters because it asks a critical question: can existing law protect cultural heritage in a market eager to consume it without understanding what it means? This tension is exactly what GI laws and their implementation in India reveal, as explained in GI laws and their implementations.

What Does the GI Protection Actually Cover Once the Tribe is Gone? 

A geographical indication safeguards a product’s connection to its location of origin rather than the product itself. According to Indian law, a GI is a label applied to products whose attributes, reputation, or traits are primarily related to their place of origin. To put it another way, GI protects the assertion that “this product comes from this place, and that place makes it special.” 

GI can increase market recognition for authentic goods that adhere to certified criteria and prevent fraudulent claims of origin for handloom and textile items. Producers in the designated area who adhere to the usage rules or code of practice are granted collective rights. This means that a textile tradition’s name, such as “Chakhesang Shawl from Nagaland,” can be protected by GI, preventing others from falsely claiming origin or copying the name. However, not every motif, weaving strategy, or symbolic significance incorporated into the cloth is automatically protected by GI. GI rights do not apply to the cultural reasoning behind the design; rather, they are territorial and restricted to the registered name and its fundamental connection to location. The proprietor of a protected geographical indicator cannot stop someone from using the same weaving methods or replicating visual elements that are not included in the registered name. GI holders cannot prevent others from using the same techniques or copying design components that fall outside the protected name. This is the core limitation: GI protects origin, not meaning. Because of this, GI can aid in authenticity, but it does not completely address the issue of cultural significance being separated from design when the textile is sold in larger markets.

In a nutshell, GI safeguards origin and reputation, but it struggles to safeguard identity, ritual, and community protocols that cannot be reduced to a place-linked name. Even if a GI is recognised, cultural appropriation and aesthetic borrowing can still occur in this gap.

Nagaland’s GI push: why this state matters for the North East?

Nagaland’s GI push is exceptionally concrete and well-documented, making it the most obvious entrance point into this issue. Officials announced in March 2026 that 24 Nagaland products, including handloom and textile items, including Pochury Textile, Pochury Shawl, Zeliang Textile, Sumi Textile, Ao textile and Tikhir Textile, had been selected for GI registration. This is important because each of these textiles is a social language rather than just a design, Naga shawls and associated clothing convey messages of achievement, identity, prestige and tribe specific memories. 

The paradox begins here. Once they leave the community, fabrics that symbolise collective identity become commercially viable “tribal-inspired” styles. To outsiders, these shawls are beautiful; to the tribe, they communicate rank, achievement, and belonging. The Konyak tribe weaves colourful garments with beads and shells as symbols of prosperity and victory, the Angami tribe makes shawls in vivid colours to symbolise valour, and the Ao tribe uses geometric motifs to reflect mythology. GI registration helps maintain the connection between product, location, and community, but it does not fully prevent meaning from being divorced from the design as the cloth enters larger markets.

Nagaland isn’t uniquely protected. It’s the clearest example of what the whole Northeast is attempting to do with GI protection.According to official reports, four items from Nagaland: Naga mircha, Naga cucumber, Chakhesang shawls, and Naga tree tomato, have received GI tags as of right now. In the meantime, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the Textiles Committee and NEHHDC to formally register 33 unique items from the Northeast, including 15 from Meghalaya and 18 from Nagaland. This makes Nagaland the focal point of the narrative, but it also highlights the Northeast’s larger endeavour to preserve cultural legacy before it is turned into a commodity.

In many places, GI preservation has effectively supported communities and protected cultural assets. The most famous example is Champagne from France, whose GI label guarantees that only sparkling wine produced in the Champagne region following particular techniques may use the name, safeguarding the region’s reputation and ensuring financial gains for regional producers.

Darjeeling Tea, which was GI-tagged in 2004, has effectively safeguarded its distinct identity in India, stopped other teas from being marketed as “Darjeeling,” and assisted regional growers in maintaining their market share and obtaining higher prices while maintaining traditional farming practices.

These cases demonstrate the effectiveness of GI protection when it is appropriately implemented; it guarantees local populations profit from their legacy, prevents name misuse, and maintains traditional practices. This tried-and-true strategy to preserve cultural heritage before it turns into a commodity is expanded upon by the Northeast’s efforts with Naga mircha, Chakhesang shawls, and other goods.

But why is GI protection alone not enough?

Even if more Northeast textiles receive GI recognition, important issues remain that GI cannot address on its own. Although a GI tag can verify a product’s connection to a location, it does not automatically safeguard every motif, weaving logic, symbolic significance, or community protocol that is affixed to a textile. A GI protects the name and origin, but it does not protect the cultural meaning, the design’s reasoning, or the traditions that accompany the textile.

Beyond these legal gaps, there are practical barriers to making GI work in the first place. Documentation, quality control, and post-registration assistance are all necessary for GI registration, yet many Naga communities continue to struggle in these areas. Documenting procedures, materials, and design standards is challenging because a large portion of Nagaland’s cultural knowledge is still oral.

The largest challenge is that the majority of producers, particularly those in rural and tribal areas, have no idea what GI is or how it may benefit them. Lack of knowledge prevents them from applying for or utilising GI protection, and local communities are left behind as big businesses or government organisations fill the void. Farmers and craftspeople seldom see true economic gain, even when GIs are registered. They lack access to larger markets, better prices, and protection from counterfeit goods. Instead, the value is captured by middlemen and large corporations.

The Indian GI system is also afflicted by weak monitoring and enforcement. Fines for GI tag infractions are insufficient to dissuade counterfeiters, and violations remain widespread despite registration. Local producers receive no real benefit from the system.

The primary focus of India’s GI framework is registration alone; marketing, quality assurance, branding, and rights assertion are not followed up on. Consequently, there is no framework in place to sell or defend GIs after they are registered on paper. GI holders find it challenging to handle enforcement in rural and distant places due to limited access to legal expertise.

To make the GI valuable, consistency of quality must be guaranteed; registration alone is insufficient. In specialised international markets, GI-tagged goods frequently fetch price premiums of 20% to 30%, increasing artisan incomes. However, they will remain paper promises in the absence of post-registration support, promotion, and enforcement.

Nagaland’s experience shows that GI protection can still lay a crucial foundation when communities take ownership of the process.

The Chakhesang Women Wellness Society (CWWS) offers a model for community-led GI protection. More than 25 years ago, the CWWS founded the Chakhesang Traditional Attires Committee to preserve, promote, and safeguard their cultural heritage. This long-standing community initiative demonstrates how local organizations can bridge the gap between GI registration and real-world protection.

When the GI tag was awarded to Chakhesang Shawls in 2017, the CWWS used it to file civil lawsuits against designers who misused their protected designs. This shows that once communities have the resources and organization to enforce their rights, legal action becomes possible. The GI tag transformed from a paper certificate into a tool for defending their heritage.

Growing institutional support is now emerging in Nagaland. At the stakeholder meeting on GI initiatives in Dimapur in March 2026, officials announced that 24 products had been nominated for GI registration, including six textile items. The Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Textiles Committee and NEHHDC to register 33 distinct Northeast goods, including 18 from Nagaland, signals that government agencies are beginning to provide the post-registration support needed for GI tags to translate into actual community benefits.

However, not all GI efforts succeed. Some textile applications from the Northeast have faced delays or rejection because the burden of proof was not met; documentation of traditional methods, continuity of use, and community linkage was insufficient, or the design was deemed decorative rather than distinctive, which is why community-led documentation and institutional support are essential. These cases show that even when communities attempt GI registration, the legal system often requires evidence that oral traditions cannot easily provide.

The key lesson is that communities must be empowered to lead their own GI applications and enforcement efforts, rather than waiting for external organizations to fill the void.

The shape of the thing: protecting a pattern instead of a name.

The way that indigenous patterns and corporate shapes are protected by the law is very different. Unlike a word mark, the Hermès Birkin and Kelly bags are protected by their unique design, which includes their construction, handle curves, and flap angles. The brand in a shape trademark or trade dress claim is recognised by the shape itself rather than by a name. If a shape tag is distinctive, visually appealing, and unmistakably associated with the brand in the minds of customers, it may be trademarked. It only needs to look beautiful; functionality is not necessary.

The situation is different with regard to Northeast textiles. A Nagaland textile pattern encodes ethnic identity through weaving, making it more than just a “shape.” The Konyak tribe weaves colourful garments with beads and shells as symbols of prosperity and victory, the Angami tribe makes shawls in vivid colours to symbolise bravery, and the Ao tribe utilises geometric motifs to reflect folklore. When a fashion brand imitates these patterns, it is imitating a cultural language rather than a shape. However, Nagaland tribes struggle to secure their textile identity because the law protects the name (e.g., “Chakhesang Shawl”) more than the meaning behind the weave, while Hermès is able to protect its bag shape as a trademark.

Culture (symbols, rituals, collective memory) lacks legal protection equivalent to objects (shapes, logos). Copyright protects new, individual creations: not generational, collective knowledge passed down through tribes. Indigenous knowledge was developed over many generations by a community, not by a single inventor. That’s the core problem: the law protects brands, not cultures. GI can aid with authenticity, but it still cannot prevent cultural meaning from being separated from the design.

What protection should look like. 

GI protection is necessary, but it is only the beginning. The designs, weaving techniques, and cultural connotations of Northeast textiles should be documented and conserved now, before they are lost or replicated, if they are to be adequately saved.

The community should also be included in the process. Protection is only effective when locals are aware of it and actively participate in it; it is not effective when it is managed solely from above. If the workers who manufacture the textiles do not know how to utilise the GI tag, it is insufficient.

Post-registration support is crucial: marketing, branding, quality assurance, and enforcement must follow GI recognition if it is to help craftspeople in practice. Textiles are collective cultural assets, not the property of a single individual, so protection must also center community consent, equitable benefit-sharing, and community rights. In short, the law must document, involve, enforce, and respect the communities whose heritage it seeks to protect.

Conclusion

Nagaland demonstrates both the limits of the law and how GI can help preserve textile history. A GI tag can protect a textile’s origin and reputation, but it cannot safeguard all aspects of its significance to a community. Effective protection requires more than registration: it demands community involvement, post-registration enforcement, and equitable benefit-sharing. Protecting the culture that underpins a product is just as important as protecting the product itself.

Other Northeastern states can follow Nagaland’s approach by first identifying culturally significant items, then organising community documentation around their history, skills, and place-based identities. Nagaland’s GI progress demonstrates that when state institutions, community organisations, and development agencies collaborate to advance from recognition to registration and subsequently to post-GI support including branding, quality control, and market access, legal protection strengthens.

They should also consider GI as a cultural protection strategy rather than just a commercial tool. The broader Northeast project to register 33 unique goods, including 15 from Meghalaya and 18 from Nagaland, demonstrates that the region is already developing a shared model for maintaining traditional knowledge and keeping legacy connected to the communities that produced it.

Refrences

 On Geographical Indications (GI) and Traditional Textiles in Northeast India

1. Chakhesang Shawl GI Registration & Cultural Appropriation Cases

   – Chakhesang Naga Shawl gets Geographical Indication tag | The Indian Aaaz (2017)

   – Cultural appropriation stinging Naga society | Eastern Mirror Nagaland (2021)

  – Naga communities urged to lead GI applications to protect traditional products | Eastern Mirror Nagaland (2026)

2. Nagaland GI Policy & 24 Products Identified

   – Stakeholder Meeting on GI Initiatives Held in Dimapur | Nagaland IP Office (2026)

   – A total of 24 products from Nagaland have been identified for GI | The Assam Tribune (2026)

3. Northeast GI MoU & 33 Products

   – Textile Committee, NEHHDC sign MoU to formalize GI registration for 33 products | Textile Trade Buddy (2026)

   – Textiles Committee and NEHHDC signs MoU on Intellectual Property | PIB (2025)

   – Textiles Committee and NEHHDC Sign MoU to Secure GI Protection for Northeast | Devdiscourse (2026)

4. Chakhesang Cultural Meaning & Symbolism

   – How the Chakhesang Naga community weaves a world of meaning into a shawl | Scroll.in (2023)

   – Naga Chakhesang Shawl – Digital GI (2024)

   – Loom to legacy: The Living Textiles of North East, India | ChaloHoppo (2025)

5. GI Law & Indigenous Knowledge in India

   – Protecting indigenous knowledge through GI law in India | IJLR (2025)

   – Threads of Identity: GI Tags’ Relevance in Protecting Northeast Textiles | Fashion Law Journal (2025)

   – Weaver Awareness and Perception of Geographical Indication Tags | IJCESEN (2025)

   – Challenges in Protecting Traditional Craftsmanship and Indigenous Designs Through Intellectual Property | Sonis Vision (2025)

6. GI Protection Framework (International)

   – Geographical Indications for Beginners | WIPO

   – Protecting local food and drinks | European Commission Agriculture (2026)

   – Geographical indications and traditional specialities in the European Union | Wikipedia

 On Champagne, Parmigiano Reggiano & Roquefort as GI Examples

1. Champagne GI Protection

   – How Champagne is protected under the TRIPS Agreement | iPleaders (2021)

   – Kolhapuri chappal row: Could Prada have done so with France’s Champagne? | India Today (2025)

2. Parmigiano Reggiano & Roquefort

   – Parmesan: The King of Cheeses | WIPO Magazine (2011)

   – Roquefort | Wikipedia

   – The Evolution of Geographical Indications: A Global Perspective | The Law Institute (2025)

 On Hermès Birkin & Kelly Bag Design Trademark Protection

1. French Court Decisions

   – Diritto d’autore e marchio contro copie fisiche e virtuali | SIB (2025)

   – Hermès Nabs Win in French Fight Over Copycat Birkin Bags, NFTs | The Fashion Law (2025)

   – Decision of the Paris Judicial Court on the Protection of the Iconic Kelly and Birkin Bags | Dreyfus (2025)

   – Design or art? French court rules that Birkin Bag is a copyright work | IPKat (2025)

2. International Court Decisions

   – Hermès Wins Birkin & Kelly Bag’s 3D Trademark Infringement Lawsuit | Mark’s IPLaw Japan (2023)

   – Hermès Prevails in Birkin, Kelly-Based Trademark Fight in Japan | The Fashion Law (2023)

   – Hermès Prevails in Unfair Competition Case Over “Make Your Own Birkin” Class | The Fashion Law (2020)

   – The Italian Supreme Court rules in favour of Hermès | Clifford Chance (2023)

3. India & China Decisions

   – Hermès Birkin Secures Well Known Status and Shape Mark Protection in India | RNAIP (2026)

   – Del HC declares ‘Birkin’ and ‘Hermes’ as well-known trade marks | SCC Online (2025)

   – Design of Hermès’ iconic Birkin and Kelly bags held to constitute trade dress | Wanhuida (2025)

4. Fashion & IP Theory

   – THE PRADA PARADOX | Chambers and Partners (2024)

   – Looking Ahead (Part IV) – Fashion and Intellectual Property | Cambridge Core (2025)

   – 10 Threads That Last | Cambridge Core

 On Cultural Appropriation & Intellectual Property

1. Cultural Appropriation in Fashion & Textiles

   – PRADA-KOLHAPURI PARADOX: A Critical Analysis of GI Protections Against Global Cultural Appropriation | Record of Law (2026)

   – From Chakhesang to Rongmei: Lessons in Protecting Textile Traditions | Thinking Space Online (2025)

   – CULTURAL APPROPRIATION WITH REFERENCE TO TRADITIONAL TEXTILES | EPRA Journals

2. Darjeeling Tea GI Example

   – Separately cited in main text via WIPO Geographical Indications resource above

The post GI Protection for Nagaland Textiles: What One State’s Push Shows Us About Northeast Heritage.  appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

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.

The Lawsuit: “Art of Luxury” Bags at the Centre of a Trademark Fight

In a 29‑page complaint filed June 1, 2026, Louis Vuitton Malletier S.A.S. sued PPE Casino Resorts Maryland, LLC (which does business as Live! Casino & Hotel), its parent The Cordish Companies, Inc., and several unidentified entities, alleging willful trademark counterfeiting, trademark infringement, false association, trademark dilution, and unfair competition under Maryland common law.

The suit focuses on an April 2026 promotion at the casino in Hanover, Maryland, called “The Art of Luxury,” which offered loyalty members a “luxury bag collection” of four items—a handbag, toiletry case, backpack, and tote. According to Louis Vuitton, those bags copied the fashion house’s famous monogram canvas and stylised flower trademarks, but swapped out the overlapping “LV” initials for the word “Live!” in a repeating pattern.

The complaint characterises this as “a particularly brazen move” designed to “purposefully infringe” Louis Vuitton’s monogram and “falsely convey to the consuming public” that the casino and the luxury brand were affiliated or collaborating. Local news outlets have published side‑by‑side photographs showing the casino’s promotional bags next to authentic Louis Vuitton products, with logos and flower motifs that appear strikingly similar.

How the “Art of Luxury” Promotion Allegedly Worked

Louis Vuitton alleges that the April campaign was a coordinated, multi‑week mass marketing effort pitched to casino rewards members and prospective customers through direct mail, in‑house brochures, and social media posts.

Promotional materials invited players to “receive your complimentary luxury bag collection,” with different pieces of the set available on successive Tuesdays in April at Live! Casino & Hotel Maryland. According to the complaint, patrons could either attend on designated days to collect the bags or redeem “tier credits” amassed through gambling, dining, and retail spending for the casino‑branded collection.

One social media post cited in the lawsuit shows a model posing with the bag set under the caption, “Everyone needs a place to store all their jackpot money… so why not a stylish bag?” and urges members to “earn 750 tier credits for your luxury bag collection.” At no point, Louis Vuitton says, did the casino disclose that the bags were not genuine Louis Vuitton products or that no affiliation existed between the two companies.

Louis Vuitton’s IP: The Monogram and Flower Marks at Issue

Central to the case are several of Louis Vuitton’s most recognisable trademarks: the Monogram Design (the classic LV logo combined with three stylised flower motifs), a related “Décor Florale” pattern using only the flowers, and the individual flower designs themselves.

These marks—first registered in the United States as early as 1932 and now incontestable under the Lanham Act—cover a wide range of leather goods, including handbags, luggage, wallets, and accessories. Louis Vuitton emphasises in its complaint that it has invested “millions of dollars and over a century of time and effort” to build the goodwill in those marks and that its products are sold only through its own boutiques, select luxury department stores, and its official e‑commerce channels.

By allegedly recreating the monogram pattern and flower devices and placing “Live!” where “LV” would normally appear, the casino’s promotion “kept the entirety of the famous Louis Vuitton Monogram Design intact with one exception,” Louis Vuitton argues, thereby creating a counterfeit design that is “identical with, or substantially indistinguishable from” the registered marks.

From “Art of Luxury” to “Endless Elegance”: A Second Campaign

Louis Vuitton says it sent a cease‑and‑desist letter to the casino on April 15, 2026, demanding an immediate halt to the “Art of Luxury” promotion and an accounting of the number of bags produced and distributed. The complaint alleges that the casino indicated two days later that it would stop distributing the promotional bags but did not provide the requested information or alert Louis Vuitton to its next planned marketing initiative.

According to the lawsuit, the next phase came just weeks later in May 2026, when Live! Casino launched a new promotion called “Endless Elegance.” This campaign, publicised on the casino’s website and in print mailers, offered patrons the chance to win what were described as authentic Louis Vuitton handbags, backpacks, duffle bags, jewellery, sunglasses, hats, belts, wallets, and fragrances as part of a “luxury French collection,” with drawings scheduled for May 29 and 30.

Louis Vuitton alleges that this second promotion, coming on the heels of the allegedly infringing bag giveaway, was “a blatant continuation of the same false association” created by the first campaign. Even if the prizes in the May drawing were genuine Louis Vuitton goods, the company claims, using them as casino giveaways after the April promotion only further conditioned consumers to believe the casino had some sort of partnership, sponsorship, or endorsement from Louis Vuitton.

Legal Theories: Counterfeiting, Infringement, False Association, and Dilution

On the federal side, Louis Vuitton brings four Lanham Act claims: trademark counterfeiting, trademark infringement, false association/false designation of origin, and trademark dilution.

The counterfeiting and infringement claims focus on the April “Art of Luxury” bags, which Louis Vuitton says incorporate spurious designations that are “identical with, or substantially indistinguishable from” its protected monogram and flower marks. Because the casino allegedly used those marks in connection with the advertisement and distribution of goods for its own commercial gain, the fashion house argues that the case qualifies as “exceptional” and warrants heightened statutory damages.

The false association claim targets both the April and May promotions, arguing that the combined effect of the two campaigns was to create “the false impression that Defendants are connected, affiliated or related in some way” to Louis Vuitton. The complaint emphasises that Louis Vuitton never licensed or authorised the casino to use its trademarks and has no partnership or sponsorship arrangement with Live! Casino or its parent companies.

On dilution, Louis Vuitton contends that its marks are among “the most famous and distinctive trademarks in the world” and that the casino’s use of similar patterns on promotional bags, as well as on mass‑market casino advertising, both blur the distinctiveness of its marks and tarnish their reputation by associating them with a casino giveaway context.

Maryland Unfair Competition Claim

In addition to its federal causes of action, Louis Vuitton asserts a common‑law unfair competition claim under Maryland law. The complaint alleges that the casino and its affiliates “palmed off” their own products as those of Louis Vuitton, improperly trading on the brand’s goodwill and creating the impression of a non‑existent affiliation.

Louis Vuitton further alleges that the casino’s actions were willful and undertaken “in conscious disregard” of its rights, which could support an award of punitive or exemplary damages under state law.

Relief Sought: Destruction of Bags, Corrective Advertising, and Millions in Damages

Louis Vuitton is seeking broad injunctive and monetary relief. Among other remedies, the complaint asks the court to:

• Enjoin the casino and related entities from using any reproduction or imitation of Louis Vuitton’s trademarks in future promotions;

• Order the recall and destruction of all allegedly infringing bags, promotional materials, and advertisements; and

• Require a “fulsome corrective advertising campaign” informing customers that the casino’s promotional bags were not authentic Louis Vuitton products and that no relationship exists between the parties.

On the monetary side, Louis Vuitton seeks the defendants’ profits, its own damages, and costs, or, in the alternative, statutory damages of up to 2 million dollars per counterfeit mark per type of goods, along with treble or enhanced damages and an award of attorneys’ fees based on the alleged willfulness.

Procedural Posture: Early Days in a High-Profile IP Case

The case, captioned Louis Vuitton Malletier S.A.S. v. PPE Casino Resorts Maryland LLC, et al., has been assigned to U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar, the chief judge of the District of Maryland. Court records and local reporting indicate that, as of early June, Live! Casino and its parent companies had not yet filed a formal response and have until later in the month to do so.

News outlets covering the suit report that the casino declined to comment or did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the allegations. No hearing dates have yet been set on Louis Vuitton’s requested preliminary injunctive relief, and the defendants have not publicly outlined any defences.

Why the Louis Vuitton v. Live! Casino Case Matters for Fashion and Promotions

For brand owners and marketers alike, the lawsuit is a textbook example of the risks of designing promotions around “inspired by” product lines and high‑end branding cues without a license. Louis Vuitton’s complaint frames the casino’s conduct not as a one‑off misstep, but as a “multi‑step initiative” in which look‑alike promotional bags allegedly softened the ground for a second campaign featuring genuine Louis Vuitton products, cumulatively reinforcing the impression of a relationship.

From a fashion‑law perspective, the case sits at the intersection of counterfeiting, dilution, and false endorsement: the April promotion allegedly used counterfeit‑like designs, while the May “Endless Elegance” giveaway shows how even authentic goods can be deployed in ways that raise false‑association concerns when there is no underlying sponsorship agreement.

Given Louis Vuitton’s history of aggressively policing its IP, and the serious statutory damages available for willful counterfeiting, the Maryland Live! The case will be closely watched as it proceeds, both by luxury brands wary of unauthorised co‑branding and by casinos, retailers, and loyalty programs that rely heavily on themed giveaways to drive customer traffic.

The post Louis Vuitton Sues Maryland Live! Casino in High-Stakes Trademark and Counterfeiting Dispute appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.

It is the second-largest penalty ever handed down under the EU’s Digital Services Act. The largest went to Elon Musk’s X last year — €120 million for opacity over advertising. Temu’s bill is bigger. And unlike the X case, which centred on data transparency, the Temu decision is about physical goods reaching physical people. Clothing with banned chemicals. Baby toys that pose suffocation risks or contain chemicals at levels exceeding EU safety limits. Chargers that failed basic safety tests at a very high rate. Products that regulators, going undercover as ordinary shoppers, bought directly from the platform.

What the Commission Actually Found

Temu qualifies as a Very Large Online Platform under the DSA — that designation alone triggers the strictest obligations in the rulebook, including a duty to conduct proper, specific, evidence-based risk assessments. The Commission’s verdict was that Temu’s 2024 risk assessment did none of that.

The assessment relied on general information about risks in the e-commerce sector. It did not engage with evidence specific to Temu’s own marketplace, including publicly available reports and product testing data. It “seriously underestimated” — the Commission’s words — how often EU consumers are likely to encounter illegal items. And it failed to properly account for how the platform’s own design could make things worse: recommendation systems that push products algorithmically, influencer-linked promotional programmes that amplify reach, a gamified shopping experience built to maximise purchase volume.

“Risk assessment is not merely a bureaucratic exercise, but the heart of the DSA,” said Henna Virkunnen, the EU Commissioner for Digital Technologies. “Temu’s risk assessment underestimates concrete risks, lacks specificity, is not grounded in solid evidence, and is not comprehensive.”

That framing is worth pausing on. The Commission is not saying Temu sold dangerous products and here is the fine. It is saying that the way Temu thought about risk — or failed to — was itself the violation. The platform had the data available. It had public reports. It chose a generic industry-wide approach instead of looking at its own marketplace. That, under the DSA, is a serious breach.

Why Fashion Lawyers Should Be Paying Attention

It would be easy to read this as a consumer product safety story. Dangerous toys, faulty electronics — that sounds like a trading standards case, not a fashion law issue. But look more carefully at what the Commission’s mystery shopping exercise actually turned up: clothing made with banned chemicals among the products identified as non-compliant.

This matters. Textile chemicals have been a regulatory pressure point across the EU for years — restricted substances lists, REACH obligations, chemical limits in garments sold to children. The fact that fashion products were part of the evidence base here is not incidental. Temu is one of the world’s most heavily used platforms for fast fashion, reaching approximately 130 million users across the EU. When the Commission says consumers are “very likely” to encounter illegal items, apparel is in that picture.

For brands and designers operating in or selling into the EU market, the decision also raises platform liability questions that are not going away. If you sell through Temu’s marketplace, your products exist inside a system the Commission has now formally found to be non-compliant. The downstream exposure — reputational, regulatory, and potentially legal — is real, even if you are confident your own compliance is solid.

The Enforcement Machinery Is Still Running

The €200 million fine is not the end of this. The Commission has been explicit: the investigation remains open. Temu has until 28 August 2026 to submit an action plan under Article 75 of the DSA, setting out how it intends to fix its risk assessment failures. The European Board for Digital Services then has one month to issue an opinion. The Commission gets a further month after that to adopt a final decision and set an implementation timeline.

Miss those deadlines, or submit an inadequate plan, and the Commission can impose periodic penalty payments — daily, weekly, or monthly — until compliance is achieved. Given that fines under the DSA can reach up to six percent of global annual turnover, and that Temu’s parent company PDD Holdings reported substantial revenues last year, the theoretical ceiling on future liability is considerably higher than €200 million.

Temu’s public response was measured but firm. The company said it “disagrees with the decision” and considers the fine “disproportionate.” It added that the decision “relates to our first DSA assessment in 2024 and does not reflect the current state of our systems.” It will be reviewing the decision and “considering all available options” — language that typically signals a potential appeal, though no formal challenge has been announced.

The Broader Regulatory Context

This fine does not exist in a vacuum. The EU has been steadily building an enforcement infrastructure around fast fashion and e-commerce platforms since 2024. Shein has faced its own separate Commission investigation. EU finance ministers agreed last year to abolish the duty-free exemption for low-value parcels — a rule that has long subsidised the economics of Chinese direct-to-consumer platforms — ahead of schedule. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation is introducing mandatory product passports, limits on the destruction of unsold stock, and chemical transparency obligations. The Digital Services Act sits on top of all of this as a platform-level accountability layer.

What the Temu fine establishes is that the EU is willing to use these tools at scale, with meaningful financial consequences. The mystery shopping methodology — buying products anonymously, testing them in labs, bringing the results into a regulatory proceeding — is a template that can be applied again. To other platforms. To other product categories. To fashion specifically.

For compliance teams, in-house counsel, and brands with any exposure to EU markets or platform-based distribution, that is the real takeaway. The DSA’s risk assessment obligations are not box-ticking. The Commission demonstrated, with 19 months of evidence, that it knows the difference.

Sources:

• European Commission press release, 28 May 2026: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_1178
• European Commission Digital Strategy page: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-fines-temu-eu200-million-breaching-digital-services-act
• Euronews, 28 May 2026: https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/05/28/eu-fines-chinese-e-commerce-giant-temu-200-million-for-dangerous-baby-toys-and-faulty-char
• TheIndustry.fashion: https://www.theindustry.fashion/temu-faces-e200m-penalty-for-failing-to-stop-sale-of-dangerous-products/
• Lewis Silkin, 2 June 2026: https://www.lewissilkin.com/insights/2026/06/02/european-commission-fines-temu-200-million-for-breaching-the-digital-services-ac-102n0sa
• Associated Press / Washington Times: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/may/28/temu-chinese-online-retailer-hit-232-million-fine-unsafe-toys/

The post The EU Just Fined Temu €200 Million. The Clothes in Your Cart Are Part of the Story. 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.

Pay Me What You Owe Me: Power and Control within Modelling Agencies.

Imagine being 23, believing you have finally realised your dream of becoming a model. You think you will earn money and help your family move out of one of the world’s largest refugee camps. You practise your runway walk in heels, preparing for the fashion weeks that await you. Now, picture this: your dream has turned from sweet to sour. You are now on a plane back home after being a model for only six months. Here’s the kicker: not only have your dreams been shattered, but you also owe your agency €3,000. This was the reality of Achol Malual Jau. Jau was the subject of a Sunday Times investigation revealing how some agencies recruit new talent directly from the Kakuma refugee camp. It was revealed that a Nigerian businesswoman named Joan Okorodudu, also known as “Mama” or “Auntie Joan”, scouted potential models at the refugee camp, then signed them to her agency. Okorodudu would later advertise these models to larger agencies such as Select Model Management.

Achol is not an isolated case. Other models have also been recruited from Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya. The pathway for them to start a modelling career in Europe is relatively straightforward. The potential models undergo initial recruitment, then travel to Nairobi to obtain passports and visas. This is followed by them receiving their accommodations and a weekly allowance of €70 to €100 to cover their expenses. However, models who fail to secure enough work or are deemed unsuitable due to industry pressures or malnourishment return to their homes at the camp. In Jau’s case, Select Model Management claimed that her client feedback was “less than favourable”. CEO Matteo Puglisi stated, “We lost thousands of euros on her. We have never asked for reimbursement. I am truly sorry she did not succeed. It was not for the want of trying on our behalf.” He also described her debt statement as a “fiscal obligation” and confirmed no legal action would be taken. Jau herself stated, “I worked hard but came back with no money. A lot of people think I have money because I went to Europe. I say I have nothing.” This reflects the financial and emotional precarity of international recruitment models.

Besides human trafficking legislation, there are currently no specific laws protecting models recruited from refugee camps or similar vulnerable environments. This creates a significant regulatory gap around informed consent, financial transparency, and safeguarding. Stronger protections could include mandatory pre-contract education, clearer disclosure of debt structures, and limits on relocation until consistent earning potential is established. Jau’s case highlights how structural vulnerability can be embedded from the very start of a modelling career, particularly where bargaining power is minimal. However, agency control is not limited to new faces. It also appears in disputes involving established models.

In 2018, Adwoa Aboah sued her former agency, The Lions Model Management (LMM), for approximately $190,000 in unpaid wages and damages. She claimed that between 2015 and 2017 she earned around $670,000 dollars but received only half. She alleged that unpaid earnings were withheld as “ransom” after she left the agency. She later signed with DNA Model Management, stating, “fashion models are not indentured servants.” The case followed earlier litigation in 2017 when The Lions Model Management sued DNA Model Management co-founder David Bonnouvrier, CLM founder Camilla Lowther, and Aboah’s mother, alleging they conspired to remove her from her contract early. LMM claimed that Aboah’s mother and Lowther pressured the agency, including threats to damage its business. They also highlighted Aboah’s success during her contract, which included a Vogue cover and campaigns for Fendi and Calvin Klein. DNA denied wrongdoing, arguing that Aboah left after her contract ended due to dissatisfaction and that agencies are permitted to compete fairly. They also argued there was no personal liability for Bonnouvrier as his actions were within his corporate role. They further noted that under New York law, certain contracts operate on an “at will” basis unless otherwise specified. Lions ultimately dropped its lawsuit. Aboah later pursued her unpaid wages claim. There has been no major public update on the outcome.

This case was significant because it marked a rare instance of a model challenging an agency legally. However, such action remains uncommon due to fears of blacklisting and the financial burden of litigation. It also highlights how outcomes are shaped not only by legal rights but by economic and social capital. More recently, the Fashion Workers Act came into effect in New York on June 19, 2025. Championed by the Model Alliance, it closes legal loopholes that previously limited agency accountability. It introduces payment deadlines, transparent contracts, fee disclosure, protections against harassment, safeguards against unauthorised use of likeness or AI-generated imagery, and requires agency registration to improve oversight.

Home Is Where the Heartless Is: Precarious Living, and Body Surveillance Within Modelling Agencies.

Physiological needs are listed as the first tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This includes basic necessities such as food, water, and shelter. These are fundamental to human survival and must be met before higher-level needs such as safety, love, and self-esteem can be meaningfully pursued. Modelling agencies should treat these as non-negotiable basics for anyone entering the industry, right?  Wrong, this is not always reflected in their practices. Many models face expensive and crowded living conditions, alongside environments that can encourage disordered eating and extreme body standards.

A model apartment is accommodation owned or rented by a modelling agency. The agency will often initially cover rent, but once a model starts booking work, these costs are deducted from their earnings. New faces or models placed abroad at short notice often rely on these apartments as they are the only immediate housing option. They are also easier to access due to visa processes, making agency-backed accommodation the most practical option at the start of an international placement. However, this system quickly becomes complicated. Many models arrive already in debt to their agencies, meaning housing costs immediately deepen financial pressure. Even established models can struggle to cover rent due to the freelance nature of the industry, where work is unpredictable, and income is inconsistent. As Rue (@Ruebarbx) explains on TikTok:

“Some of these girls will stay in a country for six months, eight months, or even a year. And it can be really hard in the first few months to just go and get accommodation, especially if you haven’t actually started seeing any of the money you’re earning.

One of the biggest negatives about model apartments is that work is never guaranteed in the modelling industry because you’re freelance. So you could essentially get into months of debt staying in these places and then never earn enough money to pay your agents back.”

Therefore, housing shifts from being a form of stability to a mechanism of financial pressure. Rather than functioning as a safe space, model apartments can become sites of control, particularly where agencies benefit from inflated occupancy costs. In a Vogue video titled “10 Models Explain the Dangerous Power Dynamics in the Modelling Industry”, 19-year-old Selena Forrest stated: “Agencies don’t have their models’ best interests at heart, because if they did, they probably wouldn’t make as much money.” She described living in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment shared with seven other models, each paying $1,200 per month. She noted: “$1,200 times seven, that’s a pretty good chunk of change. I mean, we could afford another bedroom in there.” This totals approximately $8,400 per month, enough for significantly larger accommodations in cities such as New York, London, or Milan. Another account given by Rue further highlighted the overcrowded living conditions in these kinds of apartments, sometimes involving up to twenty models in one apartment with limited privacy. In her video, Rue also explained an instance where she decided to leave model housing, entirely opting for an Airbnb. She said, “You may not think this looks that bad… It’s like 900 to share a bed with someone, and the place was just. It wasn’t great.” This raises a broader structural concern about whether housing arrangements in modelling operate as part of a wider system of financial dependency. It also raises legal questions around transparency of deductions, contractual fairness, and the extent of agency responsibility for basic living standards. 

Alongside housing, body surveillance represents another major pressure within the industry. “We’re looking for a girl who’s lanky and skinny because that’s really what the designers want.” This statement was made by the owner of Premier Modelling Agency, Carol White, in a 60 Minutes Australia video, which investigated the pressures placed on young models. Despite legislation in some countries, industry expectations continue to prioritise extreme thinness. Former model Victoire Maçon Dauxerre has stated: “The hard truth is you need to almost disappear to appear at Fashion Week.” Israel was the first country to regulate underweight models. In 2013, the Model Law prohibited models with a BMI under 18.5 from runway shows and advertising. France followed in 2017, requiring medical certification confirming models are healthy enough to work. Doctors assess health using weight, age, and body shape rather than BMI alone. Agencies can face fines of up to €75,000 and six months of imprisonment for non-compliance. Digitally altered images that change body shape must also be labelled as “retouched photographs”. French law also criminalises the promotion of extreme thinness, including content that encourages anorexia. During the same period, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 people in France were affected by anorexia, with around 90% being women, many of them adolescents. These laws represent an important step in linking industry standards with public health concerns, particularly around eating disorders.

However, the pressure to be extremely thin remains deeply embedded within some modelling agencies. Edan Mackney, who was 15 years old during her modelling career, was told she needed to lose inches from her legs due to muscle definition. She later stated: “I would go to bed all the time hungry, but I was so scared of eating because I thought that that’s what was making me not get that inch off my hips.” This reflects a wider pattern where weight loss becomes associated with professional success, creating harmful effects on mental health and self-esteem. This constant reminder of being told to lose weight, combined with efforts to maintain an increasingly unhealthy level of thinness, operates as a form of psychological pressure that can severely affect self-esteem and mental health. This is echoed in Caroline Trentini’s statement in Vogue’s “The Models” docuseries, where she recalls, “I went to meet with the agency and they measured me, and they told me that I needed to lose, I think it was like two inches off my hips and maybe two off my waist. I was a perfectionist. So I associated doing a good job with modelling with losing weight.” Similar pressures are reflected in Victoire Maçon Dauxerre’s experience, where she explains that agents never directly told her to lose weight. Instead, her hip measurements were altered on her comp card and recorded as 87cm instead of her actual 92cm. She was told she needed to be under 90cm, effectively requiring her to lose two clothing sizes within two months. In order to do this, Dauxerre further stated: “That’s why I actually stopped eating and ate three apples a day.” This form of measurement manipulation and implicit pressure contributes to a culture where weight loss becomes equated with professional success. Her heartbreaking experience, along with the experiences of the other models mentioned, further showcases how informal pressures operate alongside formal regulation.    

Behind the glamour of the runway and the eye-catching appeal of fashion editorials lies a complex system of labour, power, and control that is often overlooked. While modelling is frequently presented as a pathway to success and opportunity, I hope my article has highlighted the structural vulnerabilities that exist beneath that narrative. From financial precarity and exploitative housing arrangements to the regulation of bodies and health, the cases discussed demonstrate how easily power can become concentrated within modelling agencies, often at the expense of those they represent. Although recent legal developments, such as the Fashion Workers Act in New York, signal progress towards greater accountability, significant gaps in protection remain. Ultimately, these examples raise deeper issues of responsibility within the fashion industry and who is held accountable when the pursuit of beauty and profit comes at a human cost. The question that still lingers for me is this: Would you ever sign away your own agency to an agency, and at what cost?

References:

1) Vitkute, Demi.  “Modelling Agencies Recruit Refugees From One of the World’s Largest Camps.” The Urban Watch, October 16, 2013. https://theurbanwatch.com/fashion/modeling-agencies-recruit-refugees/

2) Matera, Avery. “Adwoa Aboah Sues Modeling Agency Claiming She Wasn’t Paid Nearly $190,000.” Teen Vogue, March 23, 2018. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/adwoa-aboah-sues-modeling-agency/

3) Tate, Crystal. “Adwoa Aboah Is Suing Former Management Company for Unpaid Wages.” Essence October 24, 2020. https://www.essence.com/fashion/adwoa-aboah-suing-former-management-company/

4)    Hays, Kali. “Adwoa Aboah Opens Up About Her ‘Heart in Legal Fight’ With Former Management.” September 15, 2017. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/adwoa-aboah-heart-legal-fight-202203293.html

5)    Hays, Kali. “DNA Says Models Aren’t ‘Indentured Servants’ in Row Over Adwoa Aboah.” Yahoo Life, October 6, 2017. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/dna-says-models-aren-t-215723779.html

6) Rue. @Ruebarbx on Tiktok. “Model Apartment Experience.” TikTok, January 7, 2024. https://www.tiktok.com/@ruebarbx/video/7386625515865656608

7)    BBC News. “France Bans Extremely Thin Models.” BBC News, May 6, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-3982103 

8)    France 24. “France Cracks Down on Anorexia.” France 24, April 16, 2008. https://www.france24.com/en/20080416-france-cracks-down-anorexia-france-health

9)    60 Minutes Australia. “Young Models Say Unapologetic Industry Nearly Killed Them.” YouTube, October 18, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt2Jaa82Yog

10) Vogue. “10 Models Explain the Dangerous Power Dynamics in the Modeling Industry.” YouTube, October 3, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9C-VX6GfE

11) Vogue. “9 Models on the Pressure to Lose Weight and Body Image | The Models.” YouTube, April 23, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKd38G338Qw

Author: Déjà Danielle

Hailing from Nassau, Bahamas, Déjà Danielle is a fashion enthusiast interested in the intersection of fashion, culture, and law. She holds a BA (Hons) from York University’s Glendon College, an MA from Parsons School of Design Paris, and will begin legal studies at St George’s, University of London. Her areas of interest include intellectual property, brand protection and model rights within the fashion industry. In her free time, she enjoys photography, reading, travel, languages, and the arts.

Instagram: @deja.danielle

The post From Dreams to Nightmares: Exploring Exploitation within Modelling Agencies. 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.