Some fashion disputes end in a matter of a few months. But then there are also long and intense legal battles.
Luxury shoe brand Manolo Blahnik just announced that the 22-year legal battle in China over a trademark dispute, has final come to an end with the country's top court, the Supreme People's Court of China, ruling in the brand's favour.
Everything started in 1999 when the brand "Manolo & Blahnik", owned by Chinese businessman Fang Yuzhou, was registered and approved by the Chinese authorities a year later. In the same year, Blahnik's company filed suit in China.
The key problem behind this legal case was China's use of the "first-to-file" system: according to it, the first person who files an application to register a trademark, is usually granted the rights over the said trademark. This also means that you may lose legal protection in China if a similar mark has already been registered in China. The most important thing for brands is therefore to register a trademark in China before entering and/or operating in the market, to avoid someone else registering your trademark.
Blahnik was founded in the '70s, but Fang Yuzhou was the first person to trademark the name in the China market in 1999 and was found to be stronger under Chinese law. In previous appeals Blahnik was indeed dismissed because the company could not prove it had a reputation in China before 2000, and because Fang Yuzhou appeared to be actively using the trademark for a shoe label he had shares in. Manolo Blahnik eventually brought the case in front of the Supreme People's Court of China in 2020, which heard the case in a retrial in June 2022.
Other groups experienced the same problem throughout the years, but things are slowly changing also thanks to the 2019 amendments to China's IP laws that revised the "bad faith" filings.
This has led to some brands winning court rulings: US sportswear brand New Balance won a lawsuit against two Chinese competitors that imitated its "N" logo; also Italian menswear group Zegna and British label Dunhill won trademark infringement lawsuits in China.
It took around nine years to former NBA superstar Michael Jordan to stop Chinese sportswear manufacturer Qiaodan Sports using his silhouette as its logo and his name – "Qiáo dān" (乔丹), is indeed the Chinese transliteration of the name "Jordan" and Shanghai Second People's Court ruled that Michael Jordan had a right to Chinese name "乔丹", as the right to name protected by law is not limited to the name recorded on an natural persons' passport or ID, but it also includes translations and transliterations. Hermès' lawyers were less lucky, though: in 2012 the French luxury group lost a court battle to stop a Chinese menswear company using the name Ai Ma Shi, the Chinese translation of Hermès.
There are two remarkable consequences from this decision, apart from the fact that China's highest court confirms another ruling in favour of a Western brand: first, this ruling may open up new possibilities for all those brands caught in similar legal disputes, including Japanese retailer Muji (still engaged in a 20-year trademark battle).
The second remarkable consequence regards Manolo Blahnik: made famous by appearing in HBO's drama "Sex and the City", the brand enters for the first time China's lucrative market (so far it was only available to consumers in China via third-party e-commerce platforms such as Farfetch) that may reveal as a treasure trove of opportunities for the luxury shoe brand.
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