The restriction of a representation to is the same vector space and operators with the domain limited to ; its character is . Averaging a positive Hermitian inner product over makes it invariant, so invariant subspaces have invariant orthogonal complements. Repeating gives a direct sum of irreducible -spaces and hence with nonnegative integer multiplicities.
By character inner product orthogonality,
since is irreducible and has normalized squared norm one on . Equality holds precisely when the omitted nonnegative terms vanish, namely . This is the restriction multiplicity bound.