This week Cate Blanchett presented the Human Consent Registry at the European Parliament. It is a tool of her non-profit organisation RSL Media, in which a person sets how AI may use their face, voice and likeness. The options work like traffic lights: prohibited, allowed with conditions, allowed. Consent must come first, Blanchett said.
The registry compels no one. It is built on trust that AI firms will check it of their own accord. There is no enforcement or law behind it, and anyone can get around it. It is precisely this voluntariness that shows how far credit and consent are from being settled in society. Using someone else’s work, face or voice without consent and without a name is now so common that the only defence is to ask that rights be respected.
And you do not need AI or Hollywood for this, just open Instagram. This week a video is running on Czech Instagram in which Aňa and Ester Geislerová, in a paid partnership with Zalando, go through a book of their looks from Karlovy Vary. They stop at every outfit. “I know, I look a bit like a puppet,” one of them says. “Menthol is attacking.” Under the large Zalando logo, the dresses are presented without the names of their individual designers.
The video is not bad. Aňa and Ester mostly poke fun at themselves. Zalando has a link to their red carpet. Aňa Geislerová’s black Marchesa dress from 2024 was in fact bought through Zalando, and the brand is this year’s first partner of the festival. Yet someone is missing from the story.
Those dresses have authors, but nobody named them
The book contains looks that someone designed, yet none of them carries a name. The black dress with a white flower, which Aňa Geislerová wore in 2019, was designed by Monika Drápalová in collaboration with Pietro Filipi. The cream gown resembling beer foam from 2023 was created by Jakub Polanka. Ester’s green dress is by Štěpánka Pivcová. These names can be found in older articles. They do not appear in the advertisement that is built on those dresses.
A format that leaves out the author
The Zalando book is based on the Vogue video series Life in Looks, in which a celebrity receives a book of photos of their past outfits and talks about them. The episodes are named after the number of looks, for example “Zendaya Breaks Down 23 Looks, From Euphoria to Dune”.
It works because it is personal, funny and nostalgic. The series works with authenticity, and the celebrity talks about the designers and the making of the outfits themselves. When a paid campaign uses the same format as inspiration, it is easy for the result to be cut into a video that, to me, feels like mockery of specific designs by their authors.
In Europe authorship is a right, not courtesy
Giving someone credit for their work in Europe is not merely a question of politeness. The Berne Convention in Article 6bis grants authors moral rights: the right to be named as the author of a work, and the right to resist a modification that would damage it. Czech law transposes these into the author’s personality rights.
But without enforcement, even a good rule remains merely an appeal to courtesy. Even if Zalando had the use of the photos covered by contract, the designers’ names would still be missing from the works. And if consent was not given, the matter is a level worse.
Remembering can slide into mockery
There is also the tone. Looking back at looks rarely stays with nostalgia. The line about looking like a puppet is a joke at one’s own expense, but it lands on specific dresses that a specific person designed. The designer, however, was not part of the script, is not named, did not know this would be released and cannot add anything. When a journalist mocks an outfit, the target is a celebrity who can respond. When a celebrity mocks her old looks in a paid campaign, it also hits the designers of the dresses whose names have dropped out of the video.
The same problem in many forms
This is neither a new dispute nor a purely Czech one. Around authorship the world has grown the Diet Prada account, which since 2014 has been calling out copying and missing credit, and it has become one of the most feared addresses in fashion. Its co-founder Tony Liu puts it this way: “Young creatives don’t have the resources to battle in court.” Czechia and Slovakia have an equivalent in the Diet Praha account, and the designer Jan Černý often describes how fast fashion churns out copies of other people’s ideas.
It is the same problem, just in different sizes. At one end there is Shein, which, according to a US lawsuit from 2023, algorithmically takes the work of small designers and produces copies of it. In the middle is the mocking genre once embodied by Fashion Police with Joan Rivers, until a scandal ended it. And at the other end there is a nice video in which the author is simply not credited. From the parliament in Brussels to an Instagram advert, it is one and the same thing.
Blanchett’s registry, watchdog accounts and credit under a photo in an advert share one thing in common. They work only when someone decides to act on them. The rule itself is simple, though. When you make content or advertising out of someone else’s work, its author belongs to it too, and usually a name and consent are enough. This is not about one video. We see the same thing everywhere and rely on each author to sort it out for themselves. In other words, that nobody will speak up. Credit and consent cannot remain a decorative gesture of good brands. They must become part of the infrastructure.
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