FKA Twigs and The Twigs Battle Over Name: 2013 Emails Reveal the Moment It Could Have Ended

Sometimes the most revealing moments in a legal fight aren’t the courtroom clashes—they’re the conversations that happened long before anyone hired a lawyer. And in the escalating trademark dispute between FKA Twigs and the indie band The Twigs, those early 2013 emails tell a story of missed opportunity and competing visions of artistic identity.

Here’s the timeline: Back in March 2026, FKA Twigs sued the band The Twigs—an indie group formed by sisters Laura and Linda Good in 1994—after they sent her cease and desist letters demanding she either stop using her stage name or pay them over $1 million in compensation. Now The Twigs have fired back with a countersuit alleging trademark infringement, and they’ve included evidence of something striking: alleged emails showing they offered FKA a path forward thirteen years ago.

According to The Twigs’countersuit, they proposed a compromise in 2013. FKA Twigs would pay them $15K, and she’d be allowed to go by“Twigs”alone while they retained“The Twigs.”It sounds reasonable on paper—a clear distinction, money in hand, everybody wins. But FKA declined. Her alleged emails in response reveal why: the name meant something irreplaceable to her. She wrote that she’d created the FKA Twigs persona at a time when she was very alone and incredibly vulnerable. It wasn’t just a brand. It was survival.

The Goods understood her sentiment—their emails show empathy. But they couldn’t budge on the core issue: they had a legal responsibility to defend their trademark. Marketplace confusion, they argued, was a real problem. Artists searching for one band could end up with another. That’s not an edge case in trademark law—it’s the whole point. So they made their final pitch:“It sounds like you’ve come a long way, and maybe it’s time to embrace a new name—one that represents where you’re going, instead of where you’ve been.”

Fast forward to 2026, and the irony cuts deep. FKA Twigs has become a global phenomenon. And according to The Twigs’countersuit, she’s increasingly dropped the“FKA”and gone by simply“Twigs”—the exact compromise they’d tried to engineer years earlier. The Good sisters argue she’s used her celebrity power to erase their brand from the marketplace, intentionally building association with“Twigs”while eroding their goodwill in the same musical channels. Whether a judge agrees or not, the emails reveal a moment when both parties might have walked away satisfied. Instead, they’re in court, and the name that once meant vulnerability and identity is now at the center of a trademark war.