Watching the sequel, one thing is obvious: this is not a film about clothes. It is a manual on how a fashion house converts design into property.
Four layers of protection in one garment
A single product can carry several rights at once. The brand name and logo are trademarks. The shape or ornamentation can be an industrial design. A distinctive print or pattern is an artistic work protected by copyright. And in some markets a colour or a shape used consistently becomes a non-traditional trademark, as with a red sole or a quilted pattern.
Why fashion litigates so aggressively
Because the value sits almost entirely in the intangible. Manufacturing capacity is available to anyone. The reason a bag sells for a hundred times its production cost is the sign on it, and signs only stay valuable if unauthorized use is stopped consistently.
The lesson for a Mexican brand
If you design and sell physical products, do not stop at the logo. Register the industrial design of anything with a distinctive shape, record original prints with INDAUTOR, and file the brand in class 25 for clothing plus any class you will realistically enter.
Copying is cheap and fast. The only thing that slows it down is a registration you can put in front of a judge or a marketplace takedown team.
Protecting a garment in Mexico
Fashion falls between the figures, which is why so much of it goes unprotected. The shape, the pattern and the ornamentation of a product can be registered as an industrial design, which lasts five years from the filing date and is renewable for successive equal periods up to twenty-five years (article 78 of the Mexican Industrial Property Law).
The sequence is what matters. A design has to be new, so showing the collection, putting it in a lookbook or launching it before filing can defeat the novelty. File, then show.
The logo and the name are a separate filing, as trademarks, and those can last indefinitely while they are used and renewed. For a house with a recognisable silhouette, the long game is to take that shape to trademark, which does not expire the way a design registration eventually does.