Understanding IP Matters: This Fashionista Doesn’t Wear Fashion – She Covers It

Fashion is a more highly commercial field than other creative pursuits, such as film or music, which have a much longer shelf life. Fashion is produced to be purchased now. The fashion market relies both on IP protection and creativity in establishing brands and new products, and sometimes it can be difficult to draw a line where “borrowing” morphs from an accepted practice to an improper or illegal use.

On the current episode of Understanding IP Matters (UIPM), Julie Zerbo, an experienced industry analyst and author focusing on the business of fashion, discusses the intellectual property and other challenges. Part of that challenge is determining how design patents, trademarks, and copyrights are used to uniquely identify and protect brands from “dupes” and from “counterfeit goods”.

Zerbo is an attorney with an economics background, editor-in-chief, and the founder of the site The Fashion Law-TFL.  She specializes in how business and the law impact the fashion industry and consumer brands.  Zerbo began The Fashion Law site while still in law school and is now a sought-after expert in the retail industry who is regularly relied upon by brands, law firms and trade groups for her view on legal, business and technology trends.

In this episode of “Understanding IP Matters,” Zerbo and host Bruce Berman discuss:

• How brands are increasingly using design patents for “staple products,” items expected to be sold in high quantities or for periods of time longer than a few months.
• Why the vast majority of fashion-other than couture and bespoke pieces-is being made to be “sold in bulk,” which Zerbo thinks changes how much “borrowing” brands should be doing, all under the limitation that “there’s only so much novelty when you’re talking about a pair of pants.”
• The biggest brands in the industry are robust machines having significant power in real estate, employment, and IP filing and enforcement. The uneven playing field makes it easier for those brands to maintain their dominance, and when compared to small brands “the inequality is really glaring.”
• How AI is currently impacting at least three aspects of the industry: marketing, design and the use of models. Brands are now running “sophisticated campaigns” using generative AI, are using AI to “speed up design” while cutting design costs and using generative AI models rather than humans for marketing images.
• Industry terminology is a gray area that consumers should be aware of. The fashion market is constantly referring to products as “dupes,” short for duplicates, which are legal knockoffs of branded products but some sellers go beyond them by replicating products logo and all. These should not be referred to as “dupes”- they are counterfeit goods.