A Design Is More Than Its Final Image: Why Provenance Is Becoming Part of Fashion IP Governance
By Egoyibo Okoro · October 2026
A Dutch court has ruled in Birkenstock's favour in a copyright dispute over Lidl lookalikes of several classic Birkenstock sandals. The detail that stays with us is how narrowly it did so. The court did not protect the sandal as a whole. It protected one element of the footbed and one element of an upper, and it held that other features were dictated by the shape of the human foot.
The legal analysis belongs elsewhere, and Priventia has examined what the decision means for product businesses and IP governance: When Product Design Becomes Copyright: What the Birkenstock-Lidl Case Means for IP Governance.
The question it raises for Akwa is different. If a dispute can turn on individual creative choices embodied in a product, how well can a fashion business reconstruct those choices? That is why structured design provenance matters.
The final garment tells you what exists
It does not tell you how it got there. Imagine a garment moving from brief, to reference, to generation, to revision, to technical development, to sampling, to production. At the end, you can photograph the garment. What the photograph cannot tell you is:
- Which elements came from the original designer's intent?
- Which came from a supplied reference?
- Which were generated as interpretation?
- Which were deliberately changed by the designer?
- Which emerged because of a manufacturing constraint?
- Which feature survived every iteration because it was fundamental to the design?
- Which one appeared halfway through the process without anyone noticing?
Those distinctions matter creatively. Increasingly, they matter legally too.
Why Akwa built the Semantic Garment Graph
Akwa does not treat a design as an image. The Semantic Garment Graph, or SGG, represents the design as structured information: its intended silhouette, garment family, construction, components, material decisions, cultural context, provenance, and the production-critical facts that need to survive from idea to manufacture.
That has an obvious production benefit. The collar specified in the brief can remain the same collar when the tech pack is generated. A sample fault can be traced back to the design decision that produced it.
The same architecture has another consequence that is becoming more important. It creates design memory. Not legal proof of copyright. Not automatic proof of authorship. Not a machine-generated verdict that a design is original. Something more useful and more defensible: a structured record of what the design was supposed to be and how it evolved.
Provenance is becoming an IP-governance primitive
Fashion IP disputes often arrive after the collection has shipped. By then everyone can see the finished garments. The harder task is reconstructing the process behind them.
Our view is that provenance should not be assembled retrospectively when counsel asks for it. It should exist because the design workflow produced it naturally. That means preserving distinctions such as:
- creator-supplied versus system-inferred;
- design intent versus visual interpretation;
- observed versus engineered;
- confirmed versus still requiring review.
This discipline already runs through Akwa's design and production architecture. As AI becomes more involved in fashion development, those distinctions become more valuable, not less.
Design Trust asks a different question
The SGG records what the design is and how it came to be. Design Trust asks whether the design can be relied on as it moves through that process.
Akwa screens designs for specific resemblance signals while distinguishing them from shared cultural heritage and common garment archetypes. We do not treat a resemblance signal as a legal conclusion. Similarity is not infringement. A shared garment language is not copying. A screening system cannot determine whether copyright subsists or whether anyone is liable, and the Birkenstock case shows how fine that line can be: even a court separated protected elements from functional ones one feature at a time.
Design Trust exists to surface uncertainty before someone commercially relies on the design. That is why we describe it as screening, not clearance.
Why bidirectional Design Trust matters
Most design-provenance thinking points one way: could my design resemble someone else's? That is the screening Design Trust performs today.
The Birkenstock case is the other direction. Birkenstock's question was not whether its own sandals were original enough to launch; it was whether someone else's product had taken something that was its own. A designer or brand needs to be able to ask that question too: has another design potentially taken something from mine?
That is what bidirectional Design Trust means at Akwa, and it is on our roadmap. Both directions answer the same way: with resemblance evidence and its sources, never with an infringement verdict. The second direction is designed as an audit the customer starts, not as continuous monitoring of the market.
Either direction depends on the record underneath it. You can only show that an element is yours if you can show where it came from, when it entered the design, and that it survived into the product.
Intent can otherwise disappear
Suppose a garment enters a dispute two years after production. The company may still have its images and its tech pack. But can it explain why the unusual sleeve exists? Whether the construction was part of the original brief? Whether a visually similar feature was independently developed? Whether a contested detail came from a customer's reference image? Whether the feature was altered after a Design Trust review? Whether the production version differs materially from the first render?
Those questions are much easier to investigate when design intent, provenance and downstream decisions were structured from the beginning. The SGG matters to IP governance not because it decides the law, but because law works better when the facts are recoverable.
"The AI made it" is not a provenance model
The first wave of AI fashion focused on generation quality. That is no longer enough. Brands, retailers, designers and manufacturers increasingly need to know not only whether a system can create a compelling garment, but whether the organisation can explain that garment. Where did it come from? What changed? Who decided? What was assumed? What was confirmed? What was screened? What reached production?
That is the infrastructure problem Akwa is building around. The image is one representation of the design. The design itself is the structured history underneath it. In an industry where creative work passes through people, generative systems, technical systems and factories before it reaches the market, that history may become one of the most valuable forms of trust a brand can keep.
Read Priventia's full legal and governance analysis: When Product Design Becomes Copyright: What the Birkenstock-Lidl Case Means for IP Governance.