What set this investigation into motion was a sincere post by Central Saint Martin’s graduate Catherine Jennings. A screenshot from Vogue Runway: a model sporting a leather chest plate constructed from a from a pair of black boots from Dilara Findikoglu’s fall 2024 collection. Swipe once, and you get a visually similar piece: a jacket adorned with leather boots, only beige this time, and designed by Jennings for her graduate collection a year prior. In Jennings’ post, she points out the similarities in their works—no attack is made towards Dilara, who is also a CSM graduate, — she is frustrated but ends the piece with “I don’t believe this to be a coincidence".
She quickly found the link between her collection and Dilara’s. In the hopes of getting traction towards her work, Jennings approached a model she had seen work with CSM students in the past. “I looked at her in an idolised way,” she says adding “I wanted them to see my talent and invest”. She knew this model was a socialite on the fashion scene but didn’t think they were closely connected to Dilara and her team.
Jennings and a friend who knew this model more personally both sent across “intimate images” via Instagram of her graduate designs; the boot jacket being a key focal point. Months later with no reply from this model, styling photos began to be teased by Dilara, but it wasn’t until the show came out and messages came flooding in from concerned friends and other graduates that Jennings realised. What affirmed the connection was the model’s name credited to the collection.
While the same people who pointed out the resemblance encouraged Jennings to make the post, Dilara; whose work has been criticised for looking like collections from designers such as Alexander McQueen, responded to the rumours in her native language of Turkish, saying ‘that inspiration comes from everywhere'. “As students, we all do it; we take persuasion and inspiration from bigger designers than us, taking an idea and manipulating it to make it our own," Jennings says, acknowledging ‘inspiration’ is everywhere, however, Dilara is not a student anymore.
If anything, students’ work is the most creative and, in many ways, the most accessible. At universities such as CSM, brands and corporations are often allowed premium access to young creatives and their work by paying their way in through brand collaborations. Most recently, there have been projects with brands such as the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum and Chanel. To take part in these projects, students must all sign contracts, which were rumoured to be a way for students to sign away their work. Hywel Davies, fashion programme director at CSM, assures that “the legal document is to protect the students, protect the course, but also to protect the brand." There is a team for these projects called ‘innovation business’ that organises the legal ongoings.
As an outsider, one might believe the brands just donate fabric and set a brief, but it is slightly more complicated than that. As part of the contract, there is a project fee. “The brand pays for the course to run that project, and that pays for staffing and sometimes materials,” Hywel says. However, Danielle Derrick, a second-year womenswear design student, says, “They don't 'sponsor’ the project; you have to find your own fabrics." It is a business deal in which “the tutors are our managers in some way; they agree to the terms,” Danielle says. She outlines that there are a lot of rules stated in the different contracts, which she describes as ‘codes’. These ‘codes’ varied from each project; for Chanel, the infamous CC logo was banned along with certain tweeds and originally no black or white shades. Danielle jokes, “How would we not use black and white? Adding “I was using pearls in mine, and I was really scared that pearls were a ‘code’ for Chanel." Most shockingly, it’s the ‘codes’ of the Balenciaga project, whose ‘prize’ was to get your work shown alongside Cristóbal Balenciaga’s work in their museum in Getaria. Amazing other than the fact that your garment is useless for the five years leading up to the show: "In five years, who knows where we will be?" She says.
That aside, Danielle confesses, “I love the branded projects; they are the only ones that feel worth it." In many ways, fashion is an incredibly expensive subject, and with these branded projects, there is a chance of making the money back. If chosen for the museum projects, your fabrics are reimbursed, and “if a brand wants to buy more of the ideas, then there is a negotiation for an IP fee, which will then go to the students,” Hywel says. These projects are always a choice; however, Danielle says the students are told that nobody ever doesn’t sign. Although now seemingly protected through contracts and paid for after the fact, intellectual property is only a recent topic in spaces like universities, with CSM having only changed over recent years while others are still not seeing the risks.
“I think the third year is a little late to be learning about the difference between copyright and intellectual property,” says Maks Bolejko, a recent illustration graduate from Ravensbourne University. For recent years, the university has been in collaboration with Kopparberg to design their labels. Like many, Maks sent in his designs, no contracts, all downloadable files “I am guessing the work is theirs now,” he says. “I just gave away my work pretty much. What’s stopping them from taking it and claiming it?” he adds after learning other universities make their students sign contracts to keep their work safe. The prize is that your winning design gets printed; one winner could be covering up hundreds of designs now in the possession of Kopparberg’s design team. His opinion is that “big corporations could pay for work, but they use free labour from uni students”. He has been scammed into giving away free designs in the past, so it may be more beneficial to teach students about protecting their work instead of flashy group projects. “You should be able to come out of uni and handle yourself as a business,” Danielle points out.
The problem is “collaborations fund fashion... If we didn’t do those projects, we wouldn’t be able to do the shows,” says Matthew Needham, sustainability lead at CSM and a graduate of both BA and MA. When he was a student, contracts weren’t a thing, but his experience with intellectual property “came through experience in the industry; when I was a student, that was never spoken about,” he says, admitting that even now CSM is “educating our students in a very visual way; I think the business elements are not really what we teach." Needham won a Louis Vuitton collaborative project in his second year and did an internship, but it wasn’t from there that he got his designs taken.
There are elements of his designs that were taken over the years; similarities could be drawn between his work and collections from J.W. Anderson for Lowve and footwear for Balenciaga. Although he does not want to speak on the specifics, it is easy to find the proof online. In the collaboration between Needham and his good friend and shoe designer Helen Kirkum back in 2017, they used recycled offcuts by the corporation Vibram.
Collectively, they created nine pairs of upcycled shoes, one of which used the five finger (toe) Vibram offcut, which was then seen and redesigned on the runway at Balenciaga’s AW20 show only a month or so after Needham’s. “Everyone copies each other in the industry,” he says, and especially with social media today, “you are giving that image to the world, and if a designer wants to find that, it will end up on a mood board,” Needham says. There is a hollowness to this referencing, with Needham adding, “When it’s in that space, the reference point is lost, so it would just be an amalgamation of imagery." It’s like a physical AI; all these images have no true inspiration.
Innovation, in some cases, is fabricated. “When we communicate fashion, the audience has a very small time span of knowledge... something that might happen today that feels innovative actually may have happened twenty years ago already,” he says. This feeds into the fact that nothing is ever new; however, for young designers, there is this power imbalance.
Students I have talked to all say they limit what they send to potential internship opportunities now, but like them, Catherine Jennings argued, “I identified the risk, but I still put my work out there,” she says. When asked when she believes sharing your work is worth it, considering what happened to her work, she replied, “It’s always taking a gamble, but overall, it depends on what you are going to win." She knows, like others, that there’s always this risk to sharing anything, but it is about learning. “The kindness we have when we approach working with others and showing your work, you just have to hope that’s reciprocated,” Needham says. He highlights, most importantly, that “you can’t replicate authenticity,” he says, adding, “If an idea is taken from you, you will come up with another idea." That’s what sets aside a job from a passion and a designer from a creative; a creative will always be one step ahead with fresh ideas.