When I started my own label, I gave it my surname. Achrem Studios. At the time, it didn't feel like a strategic decision. It felt natural, almost obvious. The clothes came from me, so the name on the label should be mine.
Only later did I understand what that choice really means. In fashion, the most personal thing a designer owns, her name, is also the most commercial one. It hangs on a hook in the fitting room, it's printed on a carrier bag, it's typed into search bars, copied, counterfeited, resold. A name on a label is a signature and a promise at the same time, and the promise can outlive the person who made it.
Fashion has tested this many times, and three stories explain it better than any theory. A man who sold his name and lost it. A man who lent his name to everything and kept it. And a house that spent almost a decade buying its own name back.
The man who wanted to dress America
In 1961, Jacqueline Kennedy wore a pillbox hat to her husband's inauguration, and the milliner who made it became famous overnight. His name was Roy Halston Frowick, and soon everyone simply called him Halston. In 1966, his womenswear was sold at Bergdorf Goodman. In 1969, he launched ready-to-wear. By the early seventies, he was the designer of a new kind of American woman: free, sensual, comfortable in a cashmere twinset or an Ultrasuede shirtdress, never trying too hard.
In 1973, he made the deal that defined the rest of his life. Norton Simon Inc. acquired his businesses, along with his creative services, and the company became Halston Enterprises. Halston stayed on as the designer. He got money, scale, and an office at the top of Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue. The company got his name. His friend, the illustrator Joe Eula, put it more bluntly: "He sold his name, baby."
For a while, it looked like genius. By the early eighties, Halston Enterprises was reported to have more than 150 million dollars in annual sales. Then, in 1983, came the decision that is still taught as a warning. Halston signed with JCPenney to create a lower-priced line, Halston III, with prices from about 24 to 200 dollars. He wanted, he said, to dress every woman in America.
Bergdorf Goodman dropped his label. The high end decided the name was no longer exclusive enough, and the mass market wasn't buying as much as everyone had hoped. By 1984, Halston had lost most of his authority in his own company. Eventually, he was barred from designing under the Halston label. He tried to buy the name back and couldn't. He died in 1990, at 57.
What happened next is almost more telling. The name passed through more than a dozen owners and creative directors, from Revlon to Borghese, from Randolph Duke to Sarah Jessica Parker. In 2023, it was licensed again, for 25 years. A name can live long after its owner, but it can't live without someone who knows what it stands for.
Here is the part I find most painful. Halston wasn't wrong. Twenty years after the JCPenney deal, Isaac Mizrahi designed for Target, and a year later Karl Lagerfeld designed for H&M, and both were celebrated. Designer collaborations with mass retailers became one of the most successful formulas in fashion. Halston's idea was right. He was simply early, and by the time he had it, his name no longer belonged to him. The problem was never JCPenney. The problem was that someone else could decide what to do with Halston.
Everything Cardin
Pierre Cardin made the opposite choice, and it led to a different kind of loss.
In 1959, Cardin presented a ready-to-wear collection at the Printemps department store in Paris, which was considered close to sacrilege for a couturier at the time. Then he began to lend his name. Ties and accessories first, then home furnishings in 1968, then almost anything. By 1973, The New York Times counted 280 licensees in 34 countries. By 1987, around 800. The name appeared on radiators, bicycle pumps, hair dryers, casseroles, wine bottles, and cigarettes. Licensees sold about a billion dollars a year at wholesale, and roughly 80 million went to Cardin himself.
Unlike Halston, Cardin never lost control. He kept his name until the end of his life, and it made him very rich and very free. But a name is like a word: the more things it means, the less it means. In 1995, Women's Wear Daily summed up what had happened: "Cardin's cachet crashed when his name appeared on everything from key chains to pencil holders." In 2011, he tried to sell his empire for a billion euros. The Wall Street Journal estimated it was worth about a fifth of that.
Halston lost his name. Cardin kept his, and lost what it meant.
Buying back the check
The third story is the most hopeful, because it shows that a name can be repaired, and what that costs.
In the late nineties, Burberry hired Rose Marie Bravo as chief executive to turn a tired heritage company into a fashion house again. Licensing helped her do it, and for a while the famous check was everywhere: on scarves, caps, bags, umbrellas, and a great many fakes. Between 2001 and 2005, the check became associated with football hooligans and the British tabloid idea of "chav" style. Some venues banned people wearing it. A pattern that once meant a trench coat on a rainy London street now meant something else entirely.
When Angela Ahrendts became chief executive in 2006, she did something that looks simple and is incredibly hard: she started taking the name back. With Christopher Bailey as creative director, she removed the check from all but about 10% of the products. She brought fragrance and beauty back in-house. She bought out the Spanish franchise, which accounted for around a fifth of group revenue. And the last big piece came after she left: in 2015, Burberry ended its decades-long arrangement with Sanyo Shokai, which had produced and sold Burberry clothing in Japan since 1970.
During Ahrendts's time, sales rose to more than two billion pounds and the company's value more than tripled. Burberry proved that a name can be repaired. It also proved that buying back your own meaning is much more expensive than never selling it.
The end of originality
There is a fashionable idea that originality is over, that everything has already been done and every collection is a remix. I think originality was always a bit of a myth. Fashion has quoted itself from the beginning: a cut from the thirties, a color from a painting, a silhouette from a film. What made a name valuable was never pure invention. It was judgment, the sum of a thousand decisions about what belongs and what doesn't.
That is exactly what licensing tests. A license can copy a logo, a pattern, even a technique. It can't copy judgment. The moment the decisions are made by someone who doesn't know why the name exists, it becomes a pattern on a product, and patterns are easy to copy.
Which is why I find this moment so interesting. Today, you can type a designer's name into an image generator and get something that looks like their work in seconds. The name has become a style command, a shortcut to an aesthetic, borrowed without a contract. And the borrowing no longer stops at names. In 2025, H&M announced it would create digital twins of 30 of its models. The models would own the rights to their digital versions and, in principle, could license them to other brands and be paid each time, like for any campaign. Sara Ziff, the founder of the Model Alliance, warned about using digital replicas without meaningful protections. I wrote about virtual faces in Synthetic Faces. This is the next step: the licensed muse is no longer only a name. It is a face.
The questions are the same ones Halston faced in 1973. Who decides where your face appears? What it sells? Whether you can take it back?
What a name is for
If you're building a brand, or you lead one that carries someone's name, here is how I would think about it.
I would start by asking who decides what the name goes on. Licensing itself is not the problem. Many great houses grew on fragrance and accessories made by partners. The problem begins when the decision moves away from the people who know why the name exists.
Then I would ask whether each new product makes the name stronger, or only richer. Cardin's casseroles brought in money. Did they bring in meaning? A good extension leaves the name a little clearer than before. A bad one leaves it a little vaguer, and vagueness accumulates.
And finally, I would ask whether you can take it back. Every contract with your name on it should have a way out: a term, a quality clause, a right to approve. Burberry needed almost a decade and a lot of money to recover what a few clauses could have protected.
When I think about my label now, after closing it, I see it differently than on the day I named it. A name is the only asset that grows with every good decision and can shrink with a single bad one. Every collection, every fabric, every photo adds to it, or takes something away.
The licensed muse
A muse used to be someone who inspired a designer. Today, the muse is often the name itself: a word that carries a whole world, lent out, copied, generated, licensed by the year. That isn't necessarily sad. A name that travels can reach people who would never walk into a boutique on Fifth Avenue. Halston knew that. He just didn't keep the right to say how.
So lend your name, if you must. Lend your face, if you choose to. Just never lend the right to decide what it means.
xx, Laura
If this note stayed with you, you might also like The Human Who Stays, on AI, IKEA, and the future of the sales floor, and Synthetic Faces, on virtual influencers and the oldest mask in the world..
