On 22 June 2026, at London Climate Action Week, Lagos Fashion Week and the African Fashion Coalition released The Blueprint for a Regenerative Fashion Future, a manifesto naming ten pillars for African fashion’s next era, from circularity to local manufacturing to market access. It has since gathered signatures from designers, artisans and institutions across the continent, and it says something we should sit up for: culture is not raw material, it is intellectual property.

That line is Pillar 4. It is the closest the manifesto comes to a legal claim, and it is also where the document is, deliberately, silent on mechanism. The Blueprint is a declaration of principle, not a legal instrument; it was never meant to specify how “culture as IP” becomes enforceable. But that is precisely the gap a fashion law practice exists to close. If African fashion is going to move from being credited in principle to being paid in practice, someone has to do the unglamorous work of turning a manifesto commitment into a registration, a contract clause, or a cause of action.

What Pillar 4 Actually Asks For

Read alongside the manifesto’s broader “what we reject” section, Pillar 4 is a response to a specific, recurring pattern: global brands and luxury houses drawing on African patterns, motifs and techniques, then presenting them under new names, at premium prices, with no credit to the originating community and no payment flowing back. The manifesto’s message to brands is blunt: attribution is not optional, and inspiration is not a licence.

That is a fair commercial demand. It is also, under current Nigerian and most international IP law, extremely difficult to enforce as written. The reason is structural, not a failure of will. The dominant IP frameworks, trademark, copyright, patent, are built around individual, identifiable authorship and time limited protection. A pattern developed and refined communally over generations, with no single named author and no fixed date of creation, does not fit neatly into any of them.

Where Existing Nigerian Law Can Help, and Where It Cannot

Copyright. Nigeria’s Copyright Act 2022 protects original artistic and literary works, and a specific, fixed expression of a traditional design, an particular adire pattern rendered by a specific dyer, for instance, can in principle attract copyright protection if it meets the originality threshold. But copyright protects the specific expression, not the underlying technique or motif tradition itself. A brand that takes inspiration from the style of adire without copying a specific registered work is unlikely to infringe copyright as currently framed, even if the manifesto would consider that exactly the kind of extraction it is naming.

Trademark. Registering a brand name, logo, or specific pattern as mark under the Trademarks Act is possible and useful for individual designers and cooperatives protecting their own commercial identity. It does not, however, protect a traditional technique or motif that belongs to a community rather than a single commercial entity. Trademark law has no mechanism for communal ownership of that kind.

Geographical indications. This is the tool most naturally suited to Pillar 4’s ambition, and Nigeria’s framework for it remains underdeveloped compared to, for example, the EU’s system protecting regional products like Champagne or Parmigiano Reggiano. A geographical indication regime, properly built out, could allow a community or region associated with a specific textile tradition, kente adjacent weaving traditions, particular adire producing towns, to register and collectively control use of that name and technique, in a way individual trademark or copyright registration cannot replicate. This is a live legislative gap, not a settled area of law, and it is the area where advocacy tied to the Blueprint could plausibly move policy rather than just describe it.

Traditional knowledge frameworks. Nigeria has not adopted a dedicated traditional knowledge or traditional cultural expressions statute of the kind WIPO has spent two decades trying to build international consensus around. Until that changes, Pillar 4’s protection against appropriation rests on whichever conventional IP tool can be stretched furthest to fit, which is exactly why current enforcement against runway “inspiration” tends to fail or settle quietly rather than reach a court that would set useful precedent.

What Would Make Pillar 4 Enforceable, Not Just Aspirational

For the manifesto’s fourth pillar to become something a Nigerian or pan African designer could actually invoke, three things would need to exist that do not yet exist at scale.

1. A registration mechanism for communal or place based designs: a geographical indication or sui generis traditional knowledge register that a cooperative, guild, or regional body could hold on behalf of a community, rather than requiring a single named individual to claim authorship.
2. Contractual practice that closes the gap while the law catches up. Individual designers and cooperatives can, right now, use licensing agreements that require brands sourcing motifs or techniques from a named community to attribute and pay a royalty as a condition of use, enforceable as ordinary contract law even without a bespoke IP regime behind it. This is the most immediately actionable step available to signatories today.
3. A body with standing to enforce on a community’s behalf. Individual weavers and dyers rarely have the resources to pursue a global luxury house. A coalition backed legal entity, plausibly something the African Fashion Coalition itself could formalise, with the mandate and funding to bring or threaten claims collectively would do more to make attribution “not optional” than any statute alone.

Why This Matters Beyond Symbolism

The manifesto is explicit that this is not only a cultural argument but an economic one: Africa exports roughly USD 15 billion in raw textiles annually and imports back more than USD 23 billion in finished goods, a gap the Blueprint frames as evidence that value is captured elsewhere at every stage, including the design stage. Pillar 4 is where that argument becomes most concrete and most legally tractable. Attribution and royalty flows on cultural design are a narrower, more achievable claim than restructuring the entire manufacturing value chain overnight.

It is also worth noting, in a legal register the manifesto itself does not use, that African governments have direct experience of what happens when trade partners resist a push toward greater local control. In 2018, the United States suspended Rwanda’s duty free access under AGOA after Rwanda declined to reverse a planned phase out of secondhand clothing imports, while two neighbouring states reversed course under the same pressure. The lesson for any coalition pursuing IP reform in this space is that legal and trade leverage cuts both ways, and that durable protection for African design will need to be built on registrations, contracts and institutions robust enough to survive exactly that kind of pushback, not on goodwill alone.

What This Means for Signatories Now

Designers and cooperatives who have signed the Blueprint do not need to wait for legislative reform to start protecting their own position. Practical steps available today include registering distinctive brand names and marks under the Trademarks Act, using licensing contracts that make attribution and royalty payment an explicit condition whenever a design or technique is shared with a brand or manufacturer, and documenting provenance and community origin of specific techniques now, since that documentation becomes the evidentiary foundation any future geographical indication or traditional knowledge claim would need.

Conclusion

Pillar 4 states a principle the law has not yet caught up to. That is not a criticism of the manifesto, whose purpose is to declare intent, not draft statute. It is, instead, the opening for exactly the kind of legal work a fashion law practice is positioned to do: turning “culture is intellectual property” from a line in a declaration into a registration, a contract, or a claim that a community can actually bring. The Blueprint has done the work of naming the problem publicly and gathering a coalition behind it. What it is asking for next, whether or not it says so explicitly, is lawyers willing to build the mechanism.

About the Author

Bernice Ofunre Asein, Esq. is the Managing Partner of Cardinal Counsel (Barristers and Solicitors), a boutique commercial law firm specialising in fashion law, intellectual property, and creative economy transactions. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Fashion Law Institute Africa and the author of Fashion Law in Africa (FLIAfrica Imprint, 2025), the first fashion law text published on the African continent.

About Cardinal Counsel

Cardinal Counsel (Barristers & Solicitors) is a specialist commercial law firm based in Lagos, Nigeria, advising designers, brands, cooperatives, and creative industry clients on intellectual property protection, contract drafting, and regulatory compliance across Nigeria and the wider African market.

Work With Us

If you have signed the Blueprint and want to know what protecting your work actually requires, trademark registration, licensing terms that make attribution enforceable, or documentation to support a future traditional knowledge or geographical indication claim, Cardinal Counsel can help you build it. Contact us at info@cardinalcounsel.co.

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