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Emails from 2013 attached to The Twigs’ countersuit show the Chicago indie duo telling Tahliah Barnett to pick a new name before she became FKA Twigs.
The trademark fight between FKA Twigs and the Chicago indie duo The Twigs picked up another round Tuesday, with emails from 2013 surfacing in court filings that suggest the British singer was urged to rethink her stage name more than a decade before her global breakout.
The exchange, included in The Twigs’ new countersuit, shows sisters Laura and Linda Good rejecting a $15,000 co-existence offer from Tahliah Barnett and pointing her toward a different identity. “It sounds like you’ve come a long way, and maybe it’s time to embrace a new name,” the duo wrote, “one that represents where you’re going, instead of where you’ve been.”
TMZ, which published the alleged 2013 exchange in full alongside the legal filings, reports that Barnett’s side of the email thread frames the FKA Twigs persona as something she built at a time when she was “very alone and incredibly vulnerable.” She did not change the name. She did add the FKA prefix.
The dispute now in court began that same year. The Twigs, who registered their U.S. trademark in music and entertainment, formed in 1994. Barnett, then a London-based dancer transitioning into music, reached out before her commercial breakthrough.
The Goods refused the cash. They told Barnett, per the emails, that U.S. trademark law obligated them to defend the name, and that marketplace confusion is a legitimate concern in their channel of commerce. Barnett added the FKA designation and launched her debut EP in late 2012.
What kept the fight alive was the slow erosion of that prefix. The Twigs allege in their countersuit, summarized in Far Out Magazine’s breakdown of the new legal filings, that Barnett began dropping the FKA around the release of her 2019 album Magdalene and is now functionally trading as Twigs.
The legal back-and-forth has been on a long slow burn. The Twigs first sued in 2014, then voluntarily dismissed. In 2024, the duo re-engaged with cease-and-desist letters demanding either a name change or more than $1 million in compensation.
Barnett sued first in March 2026, asking a judge to end the cease-and-desist campaign. The countersuit landed last week.
What The Twigs now want is an injunction barring Barnett from using FKA Twigs, Twigs or any confusingly similar name in live or recorded music, plus unspecified financial damages. Their documented existence as a working music project since 1994 is the trademark’s foundation.
Barnett’s career, since adding the prefix, has produced four studio albums, a Mercury Prize nomination for LP1, and the Best Dance/Electronic Album Grammy in February for Eusexua. The Twigs have spent the same decade releasing music on a much smaller scale.
Neither side has publicly commented on the countersuit. The trial schedule has not been set.
The emails are the wrinkle. A judge now gets to weigh what Barnett knew in 2013, what she did with it, and whether the prefix she added then did the legal work she still needs it to do.
