A week ago, over at The Fashion Law, an Independent Source for Law, Business and Culture, an enjoyable trip down memory lane was published about the history of trademark protection regarding Louboutin’s red-colored sole mark.

What I hadn’t seen before now is Christian Louboutin’s quote “then it popped”:

“The concept shoe, with its

A recent Mall of America and Nordstrom shopping trip (with visiting extended family), coupled with some initial moments of admitted boredom, led me to wandering through the shoe department:

Let’s just say, the stroll through the shoe department made it all worthwhile, to capture the above image, showing Louboutin’s latest fashion sense, leading to my

There are at least two kinds of buzz converging at the moment (perhaps three), especially for fashion forward and fit oriented trademark types here in Minneapolis.

On the one hand, with the holidays upon us it’s hard to avoid the barrage of billboard ads in the Minneapolis skyway promoting the first brick and mortar entry

As you know, we’ve spun a lot of fabric over the last few years on the topic of brand and trademark truncation. Marketers seem to love the informality, emotionality, and efficiency of truncated brand names. I suppose trademark types love them too, since they can have the tendency to spin off a variety of

As promised, here are some further thoughts, lessons learned, and remaining unanswered questions concerning the recent and long-anticipated decision of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Christian Louboutin S.A. v. Yves Saint Laurent Am. Holding, Inc.

Lessons Learned for Marketing Types:

  • Single color trademarks may be owned, registered, and protected when

There has been quite a flap surrounding the poster and invitation used by the University of Pennsylvania Law School to promote Penn Intellectual Property Group’s Fashion Law Symposium, scheduled for a week from tomorrow. The symposium appears to be designed as a serious affair, boasting an all-star cast of general counsel from the fashion

The Louboutin lacquered red sole trademark is the subject of great debate in the trademark world, fashion industry, popular news media, and among law school academics and friends of the court.

I’m just not seeing it. I really don’t see a viable trademark claim here for Louboutin. Not for the reasons

A purely hypothetical puzzle, but I’m wondering, would Christian Louboutin have a viable trademark claim if Yves Saint Laurent sold women’s shoes in boxes bearing the above seemingly random grid of letters, each letter having equal type, style, font, color and emphasis?

For those of you who answered with a strong “of course not,” I suspect your answer must change if selected highlighting is added in a way that emphasizes the LOUBOUTIN mark, makes it clearly legible, and causes it to visually “pop” from the letter grid, as shown below:

Here is the point. In Christian Louboutin’s current trademark infringement lawsuit against Yves Saint Laurent (asserting Louboutin’s lacquered red sole trademark for women’s high fashion designer footwear), it is important to appreciate that the allegedly infringing women’s shoes at issue are monochrome red in color, meaning the entire shoe is red, each and every portion, not just the sole (which is the extent of Louboutin’s registered non-traditional single color trademark), making it very difficult to argue that the allegedly infringing Yves Saint Laurent red sole does anything other than blend into the background of their entirely red-colored shoes.

In fact, I’m left wondering whether an average consumer would even discern Louboutin’s red sole mark in Yves Saint Laurent’s monochrome red high heel shoes, anymore than they would notice the LOUBOUTIN mark in the colorless letter grid at the top of this post, or whether they would more likely and simply see a harmless sea of letters and a harmless sea of red throughout the entire shoe.

Stay tuned for some more of my thoughts on Louboutin’s lacquered red sole trademark infringement claim against Yves Saint Laurent.

In the meantime, below the jump you’ll find a depiction of the same letter grid with more highlighted words that are relevant to the current trademark battle between Louboutin and Yves Saint Laurent.Continue Reading Louboutin Red: Blending Into the Background

–Catlan McCurdy, Attorney

If the thousands of ads I have seen over the years have taught me anything, it is that the words “Ralph Lauren” and “drug traffickers” don’t belong in the same sentence. According to ad campaigns, upon hearing “Ralph Lauren” we are instead supposed to imagine clean-shaven, chiseled young men with their equally