Wearables

The Decorative Band Has Detachable Confidence

A New York label's hoodie band got a design patent in 2026, after an examiner weighed it against Instagram posts, marketplace listings and a British filing from 1901.

Clay-diorama editorial illustration of a decorative fabric band and jacket cuff.

What changes in this design

A reader might picture a band as a plain, closed strip and expect details about its material, fastening, or use.

Instead, this record shows a narrow loop with a rear gap, a front made of repeating angular panels, curved edge lines, and narrow segments crossing the gap area. It calls the band detachable without showing how that happens.

Knowing that boundary helps you read the image carefully: the visible pattern and shape are supported, while material, attachment method, and performance are not established here.

What the examiner checked on March 3

On one day in March 2026, a design patent examiner opened four web pages and wrote them down. Two were Instagram posts from a costume-jewelry brand, from April 2020 and July 2023. The other two were marketplace listings: a set of armbands, and a pack of woven friendship wristbands. Each is stamped on the front of the patent that came out of it: site visited Mar. 3, 2026.

That patent issued on August 11, 2026: US D1,140,506, "Detachable Decorative Band." One claim, thirteen drawing sheets. In the last three figures the band is fastened to a hooded sweatshirt drawn in broken lines, because the sweatshirt isn't what's owned. The applicant is Alice + Olivia, the named inventor its founder, Stacey Bendet. Filed February 2024, classified as apparel rather than jewelry. The term is fifteen years, which I find telling.

Why a dress label ends up here at all

Four times between 2007 and 2011, Congress was asked to give fashion designs a copyright of their own. The bills were modest: three years of protection, registration required within three months of showing the design in public. One version cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously in December 2010. None of the four became law.

Then in 2017 the Supreme Court drew the line that still holds. Art on a useful object can be copyrighted if you can perceive it separately from the object and it would stand on its own as art. Stripes and chevrons on a cheerleading uniform: yes. The cut of the uniform: no. The shape and configuration of a band sits on the wrong side of that line, and so does most of what a clothing designer actually draws. What's left is the design patent.

Six of the fifteen came from one man

The examiner also weighed the band against fifteen earlier U.S. patents and four foreign ones. The oldest is British, from September 1901. There's a French filing from 1979, an Austrian one from 1991, a German one from 2010. Six of the fifteen American references trace to one inventor, Daniel Kasidi Nyaggah, of Rastaclat, a Long Beach brand that started by turning shoelaces into bracelets. One of the six is a reissue, filed in 2022 and granted in 2023. Design patent reissues are unusual; they generally mean an owner reworking scope for something it intends to enforce. The fence around decorative bands was already up, I think.

Thirty months, or roughly five selling seasons

Filed February 2024, granted August 2026: just under thirty months. The office has been working on this, but I don't see the clock catching up. First-action pendency for designs fell from 16.9 months to 14, the lowest since 2018, and the unexamined backlog is down more than a quarter since the start of 2025. The people reporting those numbers concede the catch: for a seasonal product, development, retailer presentations, manufacturing, launch and the sales window can be over in weeks, so even a first action at fourteen months can land after the season it was meant to cover. The same design was allowed in Korea within five months of the U.S. filing date.

The case that copying is not the injury

There's a serious argument that none of this is needed, which I can't dismiss. Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman described fashion as sitting in a stable low-IP equilibrium, where copying doesn't suppress new design but speeds it up. Copies date a look and push the replacement cycle along. They also spread a trend and confirm it, while the cachet stays with whoever did it first. On that reading, fifteen years of exclusivity on a decorative band solves a problem the industry may not have.

The company's own record is mixed. Its 2018 suit in Manhattan, over a stylized face used on handbags, pleaded copyright, trademark, dilution, trade dress and unfair competition, and not one patent count. Two years later Bendet filmed herself confronting a shoe-brand founder in a hotel lobby about copying and was told, on camera, that she copies people all the time.

What would have to be true

For this to have been worth thirty months, a few things have to hold. The band has to still be in the line in 2027, which is why a repeating accessory suits this better than a dress. The patent has to do work trademark and trade dress can't, and it does one thing they can't: it doesn't require proof that shoppers were confused, which is the hurdle a cosmetics brand failed to clear when it went after a much cheaper look-alike mascara. And the low-IP argument has to be wrong for this narrow category.

I think the migration into design patents is rational and will keep going; brands are already stacking design patent counts onto trade dress suits over dupes. The clock, I also think, makes the tool nearly useless for anything that lives one season. That leaves a strange result: the system protects the accessory that repeats, not the collection it came from.

Sources

Reporting for this piece drew on the published filing and the references below.

The record, briefly. USD1140506S1, “Detachable Decorative Band” The checked public record identifies a U.S. design patent titled 'Detachable Decorative Band'. The reading treats the published title and figure as a visual starting point and does not infer a material, mechanism, or performance claim not established there.

More angles on this

CPC A44C: Personal adornments, e.g. jewellery; coinsThe official classification family this record was filed into, published in the USPTO Cooperative Patent Classification scheme.
The Buckle Understands a Good EndingAnother reading from the neighbouring A44B classification family, buttons, pins, buckles, slide fasteners, or the like.
The Leveling Bar Has a Very Firm Opinion About LevelAnother reading from the wider A01B classification family, soil working in agriculture or forestry.
A Glove With a PortfolioAnother reading in the same Wearables category on this site.

Read around this one:Public patent record USPTO published figure Patent issue-date index