Brexit could mean ‘effectively closing down London Fashion Week’

Britain leaving the European Union means that ‘the viability of London Fashion Week could be called into question’, peers have warned.

Evidence given by the British fashion Council included in a House of Lord report said that Brexit ‘could lead to effectively closing down London Fashion Week as a platform to promote British businesses’, because designers’ work would lose automatic legal protection.

This amounts to ‘a direct threat to jobs in the UK and, more broadly, to the standing of the UK’s fashion industry’, the report added.

Under current EU laws, fashion designs are automatically given Intellectual Property protection, allowing designers to avoid the potentially substantial cost of registering all their individual pieces of work.

The BFC raised concerns that after Brexit, UK designers would find it more cost effective to show their collections abroad, as the price of manually registering design rights in the EU would make London an ‘uncompetitive’ option.

The Creative Industries Federation agreed that Brexit posed a risk to UK fashion shows.

Their evidence in the report stated: “Companies would enjoy less protection by first showing their work in the UK than in the EU.”

The House of Lords EU Committee concluded that a ‘comprehensive agreement on the protection of intellectual property rights’ was required to protect to UK fashion industry, and continue the feasibility of events such as London Fashion Week.

The British fashion industry employs 880,000 people in the UK, and a BFC council survey conducted during the EU referendum campaign found that 90% of designers planned to vote remain.