In a legal battle that recently began in Manhattan’s Southern District Court, Adidas and fashion brand Thom Browne are facing off after the sportswear giant claimed that Browne’s the use of parallel stripes infringes the copyright of their three-way mark.
For the uninitiated, Adidas first filed a lawsuit against the luxury brand in June 2021, saying the latter’s four-band designs are “confusingly similar” to its three-band brand and infringe on the company’s trademark. He argued that “despite the knowledge of Thom Browne [its] rights to the famous three-band brand,” the fashion house “has expanded its product offering much further [its] specialty in formal wear and business attire.” He stated that Browne now “sells sports-style clothing and footwear with two, three or four parallel stripes in a manner confusingly similar to Adidas’ three-stripe branding.”
Further away, Adidas argued that Browne is reaping the benefits of the “widespread fame and great public recognition and extremely valuable goodwill” of the sportswear brand that Adidas has built through “millions of dollars” of promotional marketing.
Everyday women’s clothing quoted Adidas attorney R Charles Henn Jr of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP as saying Adidas is seeking $867,225 in damages for potential licensing fees and an additional $7 million in profits that based in New York brand supposedly made of products with stripes.
Designer Thom Browne, who found his brand in 2001 and is the newly appointed president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, came to court with the contested four stripes on his socks. The designer had initially released a three-stripe design, called the “Three-Bar Signature”, around 2005. CNN cited court documents that claimed her fashion brand agreed to stop using the motif afterwards Adidas contacted the brand’s then-CEO about the matter two years after the design’s debut.
Designer Thom Browne arrives at Manhattan Federal Court in New York City (Source: Reuters)
However, in 2008, Browne released the “Four-Bar Signature”, a series of four bars jackets, ties and other items of clothing. Another contested design is the brand’s “signature grograin,” which Adidas claims consists of three stripes, while Browne says it contains five.
adidason the other hand, it has been using its famous three-stripe design since 1949 after founder Adolf Dassler first introduced it on a pair of spiked running shoes.
In response to the lawsuit, lawyers representing the fashion house said Adidas delayed asserting those claims because court documents reveal that products with the “four-bar signature” were first sold in 2009. Adidas claims it became aware of the infringement only in early 2018. when Thom Browne applied for the ‘Grosgrain Signature’ trademark in Europe. While Adidas agrees that it exists in a different market than Browne’s, it says the label’s stripe sets “may cause consumer confusion and mislead the public.”
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