How Will AI Impact the Fashion Industry's Public Domain?

• Pages: 24-31
• Date: 01 December 2026
• Published date: 01 December 2026
• Author: Kristyn Webb,Mallory Kean
• Subject Matter: Derecho Constitucional

Published in Landslide, Volume 18, Number 2, 2026. © 2026 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights

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LANDSLIDE December/January 2026

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How Will AI Impact the Fashion Industry’s Public Domain?

Kristyn Webb and Mallory Kean

The advent of articial intelligence (AI) is disrupting nearly every industry—medical, legal, nance, education,

media and entertainment, and so on. AI is generating thorny legal issues just as quickly as it is generat-

ing content. In the intellectual property (IP) arena, most of the legal uncertainty revolves around two issues:

(1) whether using unlicensed third-party materials to train AI models is infringement, and (2) what IP rights exist

in any AI-generated outputs and who owns them. If no license is required to train models on third-party materials,1

we may see more AI tools ood the marketplace. If outputs are not protectible under IP laws, we may see the public

domain swell with a glut of AI-generated content.

For industries like pharmaceuticals and telecommunications, which rely heavily on traditional IP regimes to foster

innovation and competition, a rapid expansion of the public domain may upend the chessboard. By contrast, the

fashion industry has a long history of borrowing, remixing, and reviving retro styles. So, an explosion of the public

domain may yield issues that are just as idiosyncratic for the fashion industry. Thus, it is vital for attorneys advising

clients in this area to understand these complexities. Below is a discussion and summary of some of these IP-related

issues.

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