The IP Runway: Issue No. 3
Intellectual property insights for the global business of fashion.
When Winning a Case Doesn’t Mean Winning Every Kind of Harm
Edition three looks, on its surface, like a clean win for LVMH. Underneath, it’s a lesson in how much harder proving damages is than proving infringement.
The case, fast
Georgia Aldridge, an Instagram influencer with more than 32,000 followers, ran a legitimate social media marketing business. On the side, she also ran Rolo Fashion, selling what she presented to customers as Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Dior, and other luxury goods, sourced through AliExpress and sold through Instagram and a dedicated WhatsApp group.
Five claimants took her to court: Fendi Italia, Loewe, Christian Dior Couture, Celine, and LVMH Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton itself. A default judgment found Aldridge and her company liable for trademark infringement back in January 2025, she didn’t contest it. Her counterfeit operation stopped around the same time, roughly eighteen months before the final ruling. What took until this July to resolve was a separate question: how much she actually owed.
The UK’s Intellectual Property Enterprise Court, under Judge Richard Hacon, set the number at £213,000.
A side hustle. A WhatsApp group. Five of the most protected trademarks in fashion.
The part LVMH didn’t win
Liability had already been settled. What the brands still had to prove was harm, and not every claim survived.
Their lawyers, led by barrister Richard Ferguson, argued three categories of damage: harm to brand reputation, profits lost to displaced sales, and lost licensing income. The judge rejected the reputational harm claim outright, finding no evidence tying Aldridge’s specific sales to any broader damage to the brands’ standing.
The other two claims fared better, in pieces. Nicolas Lambert, LVMH’s head of online brand protection, testified that sellers in this market grade their own counterfeits, using terms like “1:1” or “mirror quality” for the highest tier, goods convincing enough to pass as genuine, and treating everything else as an obviously lower-grade knockoff. The court found 713 sales belonged to that first, convincing tier, and that those sales had genuinely displaced real purchases, awarding roughly £200,000 in lost profits. A further 4,039 sales of the lower-quality kind, hadn’t actually cost the brands a sale at all, the judge found, partly because messages between Aldridge and her buyers suggested many of them already knew what they were purchasing. Even so, he awarded £13,000 in lost licensing income tied to that second group. £200,000 plus £13,000 is the full £213,000.
Proving someone infringed your trademark is one legal question. Proving what that infringement actually cost you, tier by tier and sale by sale, is a different one entirely.
Why this matters beyond one Instagram shop
Not all counterfeits cause the same harm, legally speaking. Courts are increasingly willing to separate high-quality fakes convincing enough to pass as real from lower-tier knockoffs nobody mistakes for the genuine article, and the damages owed can differ sharply between the two.
Reputational harm claims need their own proof. Luxury brands often assume counterfeiting inherently damages prestige. This ruling says otherwise: unless a claimant can connect a specific seller’s conduct to specific reputational damage, that claim doesn’t survive on assumption alone, no matter how prestigious the brand.
The influencer economy is now a genuine enforcement frontier. This wasn’t a market stall or a warehouse of fakes. It was one person’s side hustle, run through Instagram posts and a private WhatsApp group, using an ordinary drop-shipping model to fulfill orders straight from overseas suppliers. Brand protection teams are increasingly built to find exactly this kind of small-scale, socially distributed counterfeiting operation, not just the large-scale ones.
Buyer awareness can quietly undercut a damages claim. The finding that some customers may have known they weren’t buying the real thing didn’t excuse the infringement, but it did shrink what LVMH could collect for it, a reminder that even sympathetic plaintiffs still have to meet the evidence where it actually lands.
Reading the runway
LVMH got its win, and it was never really in doubt after the 2025 default judgment. The real fight, the one that took until this July, was over what that win was actually worth.
That’s worth remembering the next time a headline reads simply “LVMH wins counterfeiting case.” The win is rarely the whole judgment. The real argument happens afterward, in the damages, tier by tier, claim by claim.
More soon.
The IP Runway
Sources: The Fashion Law, FashionUnited, TheIndustry.fashion, AOL/PA Media, and the case itself, Fendi Italia SRL v. Rolo Fashion Ltd., [2026] EWHC (IPEC) 1703 (Eng.).
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