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INGLÊS
CAN A COLOUR BE A TRADEMARK?
In the 20 years since Christian Louboutin made his first pair of ladies’ shoes with shiny red-lacquered soles, his vertiginously heeled, sexy, colourful and nearly unwearable creations have become an object of desire for celebrities like [Jennifer] Lopez, Angelina Jolie and
Madonna, who even lets her daughter Lourdes wear a metal-studded number. Today the puckish Frenchman is the biggest star in high-fashion shoe design, selling about
240,000 pairs a year in America at prices ranging from
$ 395 for espadrilles to as much as $ 6,000 for a “superplatform” pump covered in crystals. The revenue of his company, Louboutin, is forecast at $ 135m this year.
Yet all this could be at risk, says Louboutin’s lawyer, if
Yves Saint Laurent (YSL), another fashion firm, continues to gain the upper hand in a legal dispute between the two companies. On August 10th a district court in New York refused to grant a preliminary injunction stopping YSL from selling shoes with a red sole that Louboutin says infringe its trademark. The judge did not believe that a designer could trademark a colour. He asked both parties to appear again in court on August 19th to decide how to proceed with the case.
“We don’t like it,” says Harley Lewin of McCarter &
English, an American law firm which is representing
Louboutin. The judge has overreached, according to
Mr Lewin, by making this a case about the justification of
Louboutin’s trademark rather than a ruling on a request for a temporary injunction prohibiting the sale of redsoled YSL shoes. He intends to appeal against the decision. Louboutin sued YSL alleging that several of its rival’s shoes infringed Louboutin’s trademark on women’s shoes with a red outsole, which was granted to the company in 2008 by
America’s Patent and Trademark Office. Louboutin identifies the shade it uses as “Chinese red”, but argues that any confusingly similar shade would infringe the
trademark.