The IP Runway: Issue No. 6
Intellectual property insights for the global business of fashion.
When “Genuine Parts” Isn’t a Legal Defense
Edition six is about a defense that sounds airtight until you check the case law: “but the materials were authentic.”
A French court just confirmed, for the second time in roughly a year, that building new products out of genuine, trademarked parts doesn’t protect a seller from a trademark claim. Upcyclers working with repurposed luxury pieces need to understand exactly why.
The case, fast
Kamad Reworked, a French upcycling company, sold necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and belt chains built around what it described as authentic Chanel components, buttons and belt buckles bearing Chanel’s trademarks, sourced from genuine Chanel products and reworked into new jewelry pieces marketed under the company’s own name.
Chanel began investigating in 2023, running purchases and online checks through 2024, and concluded Kamad Reworked’s pieces displayed its interlocking CC monogram, along with the Chanel and Coco word marks, without authorization. Chanel sent cease and desisted letters that year. The products stayed on sale regardless.
The case reached the Paris Judicial Court, which ruled for Chanel on May 21. Kamad Reworked did not appear to actively contest the case, and the court decided it largely on Chanel’s own evidence, including screenshots of Kamad Reworked’s website disclaimers and certificates of authenticity.
The ruling itself has two distinct parts, and both matter. First, the court found Kamad Reworked had never actually proven its components were genuine Chanel materials at all, the evidentiary record didn’t establish where the branded charms came from. Second, and more importantly for anyone building an upcycling business, the court went further and held that even if the parts had been proven authentic, incorporating them into new jewelry would still have defeated the exhaustion defense.
Kamad Reworked couldn’t prove the parts were real Chanel. The court then added: it wouldn’t have mattered if they had been.
Why “genuine parts” isn’t the defense it sounds like
Kamad Reworked’s argument rested on a real legal doctrine: trademark exhaustion. Once a trademark owner sells a genuine product, the buyer generally has the right to resell it without the brand’s continued control, that principle is the entire legal foundation of the secondhand market for branded goods.
But exhaustion protects resale of a product substantially as sold. It stops protecting a seller the moment that product is materially transformed into something new. A Chanel button cut from a jacket and mounted into a bracelet is no longer “a Chanel product being resold.” It’s a new product using Chanel’s trademark as a selling point, which is exactly why the court said the defense would have failed regardless of where the buttons came from.
This wasn’t an isolated reading of French law either. In April 2025, France’s Supreme Court reached the identical conclusion in a dispute between Hermès and a company turning authentic Hermès scarves into furniture and decorative objects: transformation breaks exhaustion, even when the material is genuinely the brand’s own.
Two rulings, over a year apart, same principle. French courts have now drawn this line more than once, which makes it a pattern, not an outlier.
Why this matters beyond one jewelry line
Upcycling businesses need a sharper legal read than “we only use authentic pieces.” Genuine sourcing answers a counterfeiting question. It does not answer a trademark question, and treating the two as the same defense is exactly the mistake both Kamad Reworked and the Hermès furniture maker made.
The dividing line is transformation, not authenticity. Selling a secondhand Chanel jacket, unchanged, is protected resale. Cutting the buttons off that jacket to sell as standalone jewelry crosses into new territory, because the brand’s trademark is now doing marketing work for a product Chanel never made and never approved.
This is a growing collision, not a fading one. Circular fashion and upcycling are expanding fast, exactly the kind of business model regulators and consumers increasingly want to see more of. Two rulings in just over a year suggest luxury houses are actively defining the boundary now, while the industry is still young enough for the rules to actually shape how it grows from here.
Reading the runway
Neither case involved counterfeit logos, nobody was accused of faking Chanel’s or Hermès’s actual trademarks. That’s exactly why both rulings matter more than an ordinary counterfeiting case would.
Transformation was always the real legal question. Authenticity turned out to be almost beside the point, in the Chanel case, Kamad Reworked couldn’t even prove its materials were genuine, and the court’s answer would have been the same either way. Any upcycler building a business on “these are genuine parts” should read both rulings closely, because a best-case authenticity claim still wouldn’t have been enough on its own.
More soon.
The IP Runway
Sources: Managing Intellectual Property, the Paris Judicial Court (Chanel v. Kamad Reworked, judgment of May 21, 2026), and the French Cour de cassation (Cass. com., No. 23-22.242, April 9, 2025).
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