“Is fashion law a genuine body of law?” This is one of the most frequently asked, and most skeptically posed, questions the field faces. Fashion law, the argument goes, is not a genuine body of law at all. It is simply an intersection, intellectual property, contract, employment, and trade law, applied to a particular industry. A long list of intersections, however extensive, is still just a list of applications, not a distinct field.
It is a fair challenge, and an old one. Every interdisciplinary legal field across Africa and beyond has had to answer it before being taken seriously, and fashion law is no exception.
The Objection, Stated Fairly
The strongest version of this argument runs like this. Contract law has its own doctrine of offer, acceptance, and consideration. Tort law has its own doctrine of duty, breach, causation, and damage. These are self-contained bodies of substantive rule that do not depend on any particular industry to exist. Fashion law, by contrast, has no equivalent substantive core. Strip away the copyright rules, the trademark rules, the employment rules, and the customs rules, and nothing distinctly “fashion” remains.
A Familiar Objection: The Law of the Horse
In 1996, US Judge Frank Easterbrook argued that a law school course on “cyberlaw” was as pointless as a course on “the law of the horse” would be, since both are simply property, contract, and tort law applied to a particular subject matter. The same objection was raised against sports law in the 1980s and against entertainment law before that.
Every one of these fields is now taught in law schools across Africa and internationally, practised by dedicated specialists, and published in dedicated journals, without controversy. What changed was not that they acquired unique substantive doctrine unrelated to underlying law. What changed is that each field proved, over time, that it generated genuinely new legal questions existing doctrine could not resolve cleanly, and built the institutional infrastructure, casebooks, journals, professional bodies, to demonstrate it.
The Real Test: Doctrinal Novelty, Not Breadth of Intersection
The right test for whether an interdisciplinary field constitutes a genuine body of law is not how many existing doctrines it touches, but whether it forces those doctrines to confront questions they were not built to answer.
Fashion law meets that test across Africa in at least three distinct ways.
First, the useful article problem. Copyright law protects original artistic works but excludes functional objects. Fashion sits directly on this fault line. A printed textile pattern is protected as an artistic work. The garment shape built from that same fabric generally is not. This tension plays out differently, but no less urgently, from Lagos to Nairobi to Accra.
Second, the communal authorship gap. Conventional intellectual property, across copyright, trademark, design, and patent, requires an identifiable individual or corporate author. Traditional African textile knowledge, Adire and Aso-Oke in Nigeria, Kente across West Africa, Kanga on the East African coast, Kuba cloth in Central Africa, is communal and intergenerational by nature. This gap has forced entirely new legal instruments into existence, geographical indications, community licensing frameworks, and international instruments such as the WIPO Treaty on Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge. This is not fashion law borrowing from IP law. It is fashion law exposing a continent-wide gap IP law’s own foundational structure cannot close.
Third, enforcement at commercial speed. Counterfeit garments can be manufactured and sold globally within days of a design’s first appearance, far faster than the twelve to eighteen months ordinary IP litigation typically takes. This has driven genuine innovation in enforcement practice across African jurisdictions, from expedited interim injunctions to platform takedown regimes.
The Absence of a Continental Literature Is Evidence, Not a Defence
Across Africa’s major legal publishers, until recently, there was no casebook, no treatise, and no dedicated scholarship on fashion law anywhere on the continent.
A sceptic might turn this against the field, no literature, therefore no field. But this confuses two separate claims. Every recognised body of law was uncodified before someone undertook the work of codifying it. Counterfeit disputes, unresolved traditional knowledge conflicts, and licensing disagreements were already occurring across Africa’s fashion industry long before any textbook existed to guide the lawyers handling them. The absence of scholarship was evidence of an underdeveloped literature, not an absent field.
Closing the Gap, Across the Continent
This is precisely the work Fashion Law Institute Africa exists to do. Fashion Law in Africa, published in 2025, is the first fashion law textbook on the continent. The Journal of African Fashion Law, Policy and Innovation is the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the field. The Certified Fashion Law Practitioner and Certified Fashion Law and Management Professional certifications are building the first credentialed community of practitioners trained specifically in this discipline, across candidates from Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and beyond.
None of this proves fashion law is a genuine body of law by mere declaration. What it does is exactly what sports law, entertainment law, and cyberlaw each had to do before the objection stopped being raised against them, generate its own case law, its own scholarship, and its own institutional infrastructure, until the question answers itself.
That work is already under way, across Africa.
Learn more about Fashion Law Institute Africa’s pan-African certifications, publications, and research at thefashionlawinstitute.org.
