Here is a post I'd completely forgotten. "If green is the new black," it begins, far too pleased with itself, "then forward-thinking Pamoyo is the new green." Pamoyo was a tiny Berlin label sewing vintage and organic fabric together, and what undid me was not the clothes. It was the idea underneath. Pamoyo released its patterns under a Creative Commons license. You could legally copy them. In an industry that treats the copy as its mortal enemy, here was a designer saying take it, make it, share it.
The label has gone quiet, but its founder, Cecilia Palmer, never did. She runs a Berlin studio now at the seam where fashion meets code, still working the open-source, anti-waste idea she was mining before anyone was watching.
In 2008 she was already asking the question that would, fifteen years later, consume every creative industry on earth: what does authorship mean when anything can be copied? Generative AI took that question and turned the stakes all the way up. If a model trained on millions of images can produce a "new" design in seconds, who is the author, and what did it owe the people whose work it learned from? Those are not abstractions. They are the heart of the US Copyright Office's work on AI and of the EU AI Act’s rules on disclosing AI-generated content and training data.
Cecilia answered the question by giving her work away. The rest of us are still arguing it in court. For working designers the takeaway is blunt: you cannot rely on the cut of a garment being protected, because mostly it never was. What you can own is your provenance and your reputation for being first. Being able to prove what you made is becoming the new originality.
