Fashion Law and Film: The Law Behind the Looks

Image Credit: TDWP 2 (The Majestic)

Fashion and film have always been inseparable. Every costume on screen is the product of a creative decision, a commercial negotiation, and in many cases, a legal transaction. On 1 May 2026, The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens in cinemas worldwide. For most audiences, it is a long-awaited return to the world of Miranda Priestly, Runway magazine, and the razor-edged glamour of high fashion. For fashion lawyers, and for anyone training to become one, it is also an invitation to ask a different set of questions.

Who legally owns the costumes on that screen? What permitted the filmmakers to depict a character so transparently modelled on a living, identifiable person, without once naming her? What legal agreements governed the appearance of every recognisable brand in the first film? What happened, legally, to the iconic looks once filming ended? And what does any of this have to do with practising fashion law on the African continent?

These questions sit at the intersection of intellectual property, contract law, image rights, brand clearance, and cultural representation, all of which are active issues in the global and African fashion industries. This post opens our Fashion Law & Entertainment series. Over the coming weeks, we will use film as a lens for exploring some of the most practically important and intellectually rich areas of fashion law. We begin with the legal terrain itself: the six core areas that film opens up for the fashion lawyer.

I. Costume Ownership and Intellectual Property

One of the most consistently misunderstood questions in film production is who owns the costume? Where a costume designer creates original pieces for a production, ownership may vest in the studio, the production company, the designer as an independent contractor, or, in limited circumstances, the performer. The answer is almost always a function of the underlying contract, and frequently, that contract may not have been drafted with sufficient precision to resolve the question.

In most major studio productions, costumes are treated as works made for hire, with copyright vesting in the studio. This is the default position. However, the default is not immutable. Where a costume designer has created something of independent artistic significance, a piece that transcends its function as a film prop and becomes a cultural object in its own right, the ownership question acquires additional legal complexity. This is particularly so where the designer was engaged as an independent contractor rather than an employee, since the work-for-hire doctrine applies differently in those circumstances depending on jurisdiction.

For the African fashion lawyer, the relevance extends beyond Hollywood. Across African film industries, including Nollywood, Ghallywood, and Riverwood, the legal frameworks governing costume design, ownership, and commercial exploitation are largely underdeveloped compared to those in Hollywood. Guild structures equivalent to the Costume Designers Guild do not exist in most African film markets, and the question of who owns a culturally significant costume from an African production and who may commercially exploit it remains unanswered by law. This is a gap worth examining.

In practice:  The Givenchy black dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) illustrates the complexity of post-production ownership with unusual clarity. Givenchy designed several versions of the dress. The original hand-stitched gown remained in Givenchy's private archive. A copy was retained by Paramount Studios. Another was donated by Givenchy himself to a charitable cause and subsequently auctioned at Christie's in 2006 for over $800,000. The actual costumes used on set were reportedly destroyed. Multiple parties held different versions of the same iconic piece, under different legal arrangements, none of which were publicly litigated. The absence of dispute does not mean the ownership was clear; it may simply mean that no party chose to press the point.

II. Costume Design Credits and Professional Protections

Credit in the entertainment industry determines professional reputation, negotiating leverage, residual entitlements, and, in some jurisdictions, downstream intellectual property rights. Costume designers occupy a structurally vulnerable position: their work is among the most visible in any production, yet they are among the most frequently undercredited creative contributors.

In the United States, the Costume Designers Guild (IATSE Local 892) provides some contractual protections, including provisions governing credit, minimum compensation, and working conditions.

These protections are imperfect and jurisdiction-specific. Outside the major Hollywood studios, and entirely outside the American context, they are largely absent. There is no equivalent guild structure in any African film industry. The practical consequence is that a costume designer working on a Nollywood production has no formal mechanism for asserting credit, no industry-standard contract to fall back on, and limited legal recourse if their contribution is appropriated or misattributed.

The legal questions here are straightforward to articulate, even if they are difficult to resolve in practice: what contractual protections should a costume designer insist upon before agreeing to work on a production? What remedies are available if credit is wrongly denied? Can a designer retain any ownership interest in original work created for a production where no written agreement exists? These are questions that fashion lawyers advising creative clients need to be equipped to answer.

III. Brand Clearance and Product Placement

Every identifiable brand that appears in a film has either been the subject of a paid placement agreement or has been cleared for appearance. This arrangement reflects a legal ecosystem that governs the relationship between commercial identities and creative works. Where a real brand appears without consent in a manner that could imply endorsement, the production is exposed to trade mark infringement and passing off claims. Conversely, where a brand has paid for placement, the agreement will typically govern screen time, prominence, the character's narrative relationship with the brand, and exclusivity arrangements with competing labels.

Fashion brands are among the most commercially significant subjects of product placement agreements in the entertainment industry precisely because of the aspirational power of screen representation. The value of a luxury handbag carried by the right character in the right film is credible brand positioning, and the contracts that govern it reflect that value.

It is also worth noting that when brands decline to participate in films, productions sometimes create fictional equivalents specifically to avoid exposure to clearance. The decision to use a fictional brand rather than a real one is itself a legal strategy and an instructive one for students of fashion law.

IV. Right of Publicity, Defamation, and the Fictionalised Real

Perhaps the most legally consequential area that film opens for fashion lawyers is the treatment of real persons and real institutions within fictional narratives. The original Devil Wears Prada is the canonical example in the fashion context. The film is transparently based on Anna Wintour, the Editor-in-Chief of American Vogue, and on Vogue itself, yet neither is named. The central character is Miranda Priestly. The magazine is Runway. The choice was a deliberate legal architecture designed to reduce exposure to claims under the law of defamation, the right of publicity, and false-light invasion of privacy.

The imperative legal question is whether fictionalisation provides immunity. The answer, in most common law jurisdictions, is: not automatically. Where a real individual is sufficiently identifiable in a fictional portrayal, regardless of whether they are named, courts have found that the fictional label does not insulate a defendant from liability. The test is identification, not nomenclature. A claimant who can demonstrate that a reasonable person would identify the fictional character as a portrayal of them may still have a viable cause of action, notwithstanding the absence of express naming.

For fashion lawyers, this matters acutely. Fashion houses, designers, and industry figures are frequent subjects of creative works in film, fiction, documentaries, and streaming content. Advising a creative client on the permissible boundaries of fictionalisation requires an understanding of these limits, and of how different jurisdictions draw the line between protected creative expression and actionable misrepresentation.

V. Costume Licensing and the Commercial Afterlife of Iconic Looks

A film costume often retains commercial value even after production ends. For films that generate culturally iconic looks, the commercial afterlife of those costumes, through licensing, exhibition, auction, replica manufacture, and brand collaboration, can be of substantial value. The legal frameworks governing the afterlife are layered and frequently misunderstood.

Licensing an iconic film look requires navigating at least three distinct bodies of rights: the copyright subsisting in the costume design, the trade mark rights of any incorporated brand, and the image rights of the performer associated with the look. These rights may be held by different parties, under different terms, in different jurisdictions. A studio that holds production copyright in a costume does not necessarily hold the right to license it for commercial use in a manner that implies endorsement by the performer who wore it. A designer whose work is incorporated in the costume may retain moral rights under some legal systems that constrain how the work may be exploited.

For students entering fashion law practice and lawyers already in it, understanding licensing structures is foundational. The principles that govern the commercial exploitation of iconic film costumes are directly analogous to those governing fashion collaboration agreements, designer licensing deals, and, of particular relevance on the African continent, the commercialisation of culturally significant traditional dress.

VI. Fashion as Narrative: Cultural Representation and Legal Questions

The final area is the most conceptually demanding, but arguably the most important for fashion lawyers building a practice on the African continent. Film has historically been one of the most powerful vehicles through which fashion ideals are constructed, circulated, and, critically, extracted from their cultural origins and absorbed into mainstream commercial markets without acknowledgement, attribution, or compensation.

The legal questions this raises include the protection of traditional dress and cultural textile traditions under existing intellectual property frameworks; the extent to which cultural appropriation in film costuming gives rise to actionable legal claims under trade mark, copyright, or misappropriation doctrine; and the broader policy question of how intellectual property law should be developed to respond to the systematic commercial exploitation of African aesthetic traditions in global media.

These are current issues in international IP policy, in WIPO's ongoing work programme on traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, and in the emerging body of African fashion law scholarship. They are also questions with concrete commercial consequences: every time an African textile tradition appears on a global screen without attribution or licensing, a legal question arises that the fashion lawyer is uniquely positioned to address, if they have been trained to recognise it.

What This Series Will Do

Over the coming weeks, this series will develop each of these areas in depth, using specific films, real transactions, and examples from the African industry to ground the legal analysis in practice. The series begins where the cultural conversation begins: with The Devil Wears Prada 2, and the legal questions its production history, and its predecessor's, have already answered, and left open.

Fashion law is a demanding and technically complex field at the intersection of intellectual property, commercial law, cultural policy, and industry regulation. Film, as this series will demonstrate, is one of the richest laboratories available for understanding how those intersections work in practice.

The law behind the looks is more consequential than most people assume. This series is designed to make that consequence visible.

This article is the first post in the Fashion Law & Film series, part of the Fashion Law & the Business of Entertainment series produced by FLAA. FLAA is a professional legal education programme dedicated to building the next generation of fashion lawyers across Africa.