The Swiss luxury brand Vetements is famously subversive, making pricey versions of cheap and common objects, like T-shirts and shopping bags, prized by the likes of Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, Celine Dion and Madonna.
But not everyone gets it.
“Vêtements” means simply “clothing” in French, and the name reflects the brand’s cheeky high-low approach. This is the company, after all, that last year sent Gigi Hadid down the runway in a minidress made of packing tape.
Adopting such an unadorned name, however, has left Vetements vulnerable in the United States, where the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refused to register the company’s trademarks, saying the translated term “clothing” is too generic to protect.
Now, Vetements has asked the Supreme Court to step in. In a petition to the court last month, the company’s lawyers said that the trademark authorities and courts across the country were treating words in foreign languages differently from those in English, and that they were inconsistent in how they handled translations.
The result, they said, is that some companies, like Veuve Clicquot, the Champagne maker, get a trademark registration, while others are left unprotected.
“Veuve” — the French word for “widow” — would not be widely understood or translated by American consumers, trademark examiners reasoned. “Vêtements,” they concluded, was another matter.
Legal experts say the case highlights an increasingly common problem around the world as internet culture dominates, brands expand and trademarks travel: Things may get lost in translation, including humor.
In their petition, Vetements’s lawyers asked the justices to consider whether translation must control any trademark involving a foreign language. By focusing on the meaning of a translated word, they argued, the American authorities are ignoring a fundamental tenet of U.S. law that trademarks should be viewed through the lens of consumer perception.
Trademarks are intended to tell buyers where a product comes from, prevent consumer confusion and let brands protect themselves from infringement. The company’s lawyers say there is little chance the Vetements label will be mistaken as a mark for just any piece of clothing (though that is kind of the brand’s shtick) because it is a recognized designer. Representatives for the brand did not respond to requests for comment.
Some lawyers say Vetements might have a point. The authorities who deemed “Vetements” generic overlooked an important element, said Richard M. Assmus, an intellectual property lawyer.
“It is a bit of a joke,” he said of the name.
Vetements’s case raises unusual questions about being deliberately basic, flipping the script on a more typical scenario, he noted.
Companies have lost trademarks through “genericide,” when their brand name became synonymous with the product they represented. That happened to thermos in 1963 after that word replaced the term “vacuum-insulated flask” in the popular lexicon; escalator in 1950, which took over for “moving staircase”; and zippers in 1930, the popularly adopted alternative to “slide fasteners.”
Can a brand be protected by making its plain name a distinction?
Vetements’s lawyers argue that the Supreme Court not long ago considered a similar situation and said yes. In 2020, the court found that the travel site Booking.com could register a trademark for its name, rejecting a rule from the Patent and Trademark Office that common words with a .com suffix could never get such a protection.
“Whether a term is generic depends on its meaning to consumers,” the court ruled.
It is unclear whether the justices will choose to take the new case, though they have shown “lots of interest” in some trademark issues, Mr. Assmus said.
Such disputes can have consequences that reverberate globally.
An Australian company that makes sheepskin boots, commonly known as “uggs” in Australia and New Zealand, changed its brand name outside of those two countries after a different Australian company failed to convince U.S. courts in 2021 that an American brand could not claim the trademark “Ugg” for its products because the term was considered generic back in Australia. The Supreme Court declined to take that case.
Questions about foreign language terms do come up often, in the United States and beyond, Mr. Assmus said. His firm represents “some big international brands” that don’t want to change their trademarks in different countries, and “it can cause problems or cultural issues,” he said. “You can get unexpected results.”
Some lawyers fear there will be more of these kinds of cases, and increased consumer confusion around the world, as borders continue to blur online.
“We do need some kind of international take,” Albert Simonyan, a lawyer who has argued for a global approach to trademark regulation, said in an interview.
Ephrat Livni is a Times reporter covering breaking news around the world. She is based in Washington.
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