AS SHOPPERS FILL Dublin’s high streets this December searching for something “unique,” few realise that the originality behind many garments may already have been stolen.

That striking geometric print on a fast-fashion dress or the distinctive cut of a coat might trace its origins to a small Irish studio. Behind the sparkle of Christmas commerce lies a quiet erosion of creative ownership.

Recent research by Naoise Farrell and Romina Maddalena of Griffith College Dublin and Paul Davis of Dublin City University reveals a troubling reality. Irish fashion design graduates enter the industry ill-prepared to protect their work. The study highlights a structural gap between what students learn and the intellectual-property (IP) challenges they face in practice.

As fast-fashion giants use digital scanners, AI design tools, and global manufacturing to replicate new ideas within days, small Irish designers face an existential threat.

Design appropriation is now industrialised. The European Union Intellectual Property Office estimates that infringement costs the creative industries €38 billion annually, even though the sector employs more than six per cent of Europe’s workforce.

Irish designers such as Emma Manley and Simone Rocha have spoken publicly about seeing their creative signatures reproduced abroad without acknowledgement. For a micro-enterprise operating from a shared studio in Galway or Cork, a copied design is not just lost income. It is the dismantling of a personal identity painstakingly built over years.

Many Irish designers are undereducated on their legal rights

Through interviews with graduates, industry mentors, and micro-enterprise owners, the research team uncovered a consistent pattern. Most of those interviewed could not clearly distinguish between copyright, design right, and trademark protection.

Few knew how to register a design, draft a licence, or challenge infringement. The assumption that such skills can be “learned later” has proved naïve. “Later” often means after the damage is done. This gap, described by the researchers as “capability oversight”, reflects how creative programmes celebrate imagination while sidelining strategy and law.

Graduates may leave college technically brilliant but legally blind. Without the language or confidence to assert their rights, many retreat from confrontation, reinforcing a culture in which replication goes unpunished.

Generative AI compounds the risk

Algorithms trained on millions of images now reproduce distinctive design styles in seconds, blurring the line between inspiration and imitation. Whether a digital pattern constitutes homage or theft depends on degrees of “transformation”. This is a legal grey area that favours those with lawyers rather than those with talent. Designers risk infringement from both sides.

They can unknowingly echo protected work, or have their own creations absorbed and re-issued by machines with no credit attached.

AI thus becomes both a creative tool and a threat multiplier. Without digital discernment and IP literacy, Irish designers are left exposed in an ethical and legal minefield.

The research situates these challenges within the lived realities of micro-enterprises. Unlike major fashion houses with legal departments, small studios operate on thin margins and personal reputation.

One interviewee described discovering her textile pattern reproduced by a global retailer but lacking the funds or knowledge to pursue action.

Her only recourse was a public social-media appeal. This was an act of courage that gained sympathy but unfortunately no compensation.

These stories illustrate how systemic vulnerability manifests at the most personal level. A designer’s livelihood, identity, and confidence intertwined. Each lost battle reinforces the perception that the law protects the powerful, not the creative.

Small studios have less power and fewer resources than major fashion houses. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Protecting intellectual property is not merely a business tactic. It is an ethical obligation. The Creative Ireland Programme 2023–2027 calls for protecting creative work as a national asset linked to fair, sustainable growth. Fast-fashion’s cycle of replication and disposability contradicts this principle, eroding both environmental and cultural integrity.

Teaching young designers to defend their ideas is therefore part of a larger sustainability agenda. It is about valuing originality as much as we value recyclability.

Embedding IP awareness within education supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals on Decent Work and Responsible Consumption, recognising creative labour as a form of ethical enterprise.

As the World of Learning 2024 Report reminds us, “capability, not compliance, determines competitiveness”. The capability to protect one’s work is now as critical as the ability to create it.

How to fix it

The solution proposed by the research team is refreshingly practical: integrate IP and brand-protection literacy directly into fashion curricula. Unfortunately it’s not there now. Crucially, the goal is not to produce amateur lawyers but legally literate creatives. These are designers who see IP as part of their creative toolkit.

By framing ownership and authenticity as design principles, education transforms legal literacy into creative confidence. The research also demonstrates that embedding such literacy strengthens collaboration across disciplines. In a pilot currently under design, fashion students will work alongside law and business faculty to develop protection strategies for hypothetical brands.

This co-creative model mirrors industry reality, where success depends on dialogue between creative and commercial minds. It also reflects Ireland’s policy emphasis on cross-sector innovation under the National Intellectual Property Protocol 2024, which urges higher-education institutions to “strengthen awareness of IP protection within creative and cultural programmes”.

Through this integration, fashion education becomes a site of empowerment. Students learn that defending creativity is not antagonistic but affirmative. This is a way of sustaining originality within fair and ethical markets.

The ambition is clear. Position Irish graduates not just as talented designers but as informed creative entrepreneurs, capable of navigating a world where innovation, ethics, and ownership converge. What emerges from this research is not a critique of creativity but of complacency.

Ireland has world-class talent, yet leaves its protection to chance.

Curricular reform offers a realistic, scalable intervention. Embedding IP and brand protection across all design programmes would align higher education with national and EU innovation strategies, while giving graduates practical resilience in a volatile market. The researchers argue that this is more than an educational adjustment. It is cultural self-defence.

Protecting creative work protects Ireland’s identity, heritage, and future economic vitality. Every unprotected idea is a missed opportunity for sustainable growth.

As holiday shoppers celebrate Irish design, the real gift to the creative community lies not in the next purchase but in advocacy, for education that equips designers to protect their ideas from exploitation.

The research concludes with a simple truth. The best way to defend creativity is to teach it to defend itself.

If Ireland’s fashion schools can make legal literacy as integral as sketching or pattern cutting, then each graduate will leave not only with talent but with agency. The confidence that what they create will remain theirs, in every sense that matters.

Dr Paul Davis is a lecturer at Dublin City University’s Business School. Romina Maddalena is course leader in the Faculty of Law at Griffith College. Naoise Jo Farrell is a course lecturer in the Faculty of Design in Griffith College and a founder of her own fashion brand Kraftwerx.