From Absence to Access: Redefining IP’s Negative Space Through the UK Fashion Sector: Reviewing the landscape two decades after the Piracy Paradox

Nearly two decades after Raustiala and Sprigman’s influential articulation of the “piracy paradox,” this paper revisits the concept of fashion’s “negative space” through the lens of original research into the UK fashion industry. Traditionally, the sector has been cited as a domain where formal intellectual property (IP) protections are weak, underutilised, or altogether absent yet innovation continues to flourish. While this account remains foundational within fashion and broader IP scholarship, this paper argues that such frameworks risk obscuring the structural inequalities that underpin this apparent absence of legal protection.
This research complicates the prevailing narrative by demonstrating that, in the UK, a robust IP framework including copyright, trademarks, and design rights, coexists with infrequent enforcement, particularly for emerging and independent designers. The disconnect between the availability of legal protections and their practical inaccessibility highlights the uneven operation of IP across the fashion field.
Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production and his writings on fashion the paper contends that “negative space” is not a legal void but a stratified system one in which exclusion is not incidental but systemic, shaped by disparities in resources, legal literacy, and enforcement access. By foregrounding the lived experiences of those most vulnerable to copying, this research redefines fashion’s negative space as a site of both legal and symbolic exclusion.
Ultimately, the paper reframes negative space as a structural rather than doctrinal phenomenon, calling for a more critically engaged and distributionally aware understanding of IP law’s function in creative economies. In doing so, it refines the contours of fashion law and challenges prevailing assumptions about how and for whom; IP regimes operate.