Fashionably French Trademark is still Generic: Ambiguity Does Not Register
In the latest reminder that US trademark law has a very low tolerance for ambiguity, a fashion brand with a French name tried to keep things chic. The US Supreme Court was not persuaded. What followed was less runway drama and more dictionary work, with the settled law being that even in fashion, foreign does not always mean distinctive.
The Court denied certiorari in the ongoing dispute over the registrability of the fashion label Vetements, ending the company’s effort to secure a US trademark registration in connection with its clothing brand. Previous rulings had applied longstanding principles governing foreign-language trademarks to stand.
The doctrine of foreign equivalents was central to this outcome. The doctrine is a principle in US trademark law that calls for non-English terms in a mark to be converted into their English meaning when evaluating distinctiveness or potential confusion. The purpose is to prevent consumers from being misled by foreign-language branding that effectively names a product, describes its features, or overlaps with an existing trademark.
The USPTO initially refused registration, concluding that the word is simply the French translation of “clothing” and therefore is generic and fails to distinguish the source of the goods. That determination was later upheld by both the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board and the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
In Vetements’ petition for a writ of certiorari, it posed two questions:
Whether protection of a non-English mark is controlled by consumer perception of the mark taken at face value or by its English translation.What the proper test is for determining the genericness or descriptiveness of a non-English mark.
Vetements argued that modern trademark law should focus on real-world consumer understanding rather than literal translation, emphasizing that only a “minute fraction” of American consumers are fluent French speakers who would be able to translate the term and that, therefore, most shoppers would view “Vetements” as a brand name rather than a descriptive term.
In their Brief for the Respondent in Opposition, the Solicitor General urged the Court to recognize settled law consistent with the Lanham Act’s intended purpose, rather than consider this a novel or unresolved legal issue. As French is commonly taught in the United States and is particularly prevalent in the fashion industry, they argued that it is reasonable to assume that consumers could recognize the meaning of the term.
With certiorari denied, the story closes in the least glamorous way possible: a firm nod to the dictionary and a reminder that even the chicest French can still be treated like plain English in a trademark file.
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