Issued by the Editorial Board, Fashion Law IP Blog.

Bet Against the Monogram, Lose in Court

On 1 June 2026, Louis Vuitton Malletier filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland against the operators of Maryland Live! Casino and its parent, The Cordish Companies, alleging trademark counterfeiting, infringement, dilution and false association. The dispute traces back to an April 2026 promotional campaign called “The Art of Luxury,” in which the casino distributed handbags, backpacks and toiletry cases bearing a pattern strikingly similar to Louis Vuitton’s registered monogram, with the interlocking “LV” swapped for the word “Live!”. Despite a cease and desist letter sent that same month, the casino allegedly proceeded with a follow-up giveaway, “Endless Elegance,” offering what it described as genuine Louis Vuitton merchandise to rewards members.

At the centre of the complaint lie the twin pillars of the Lanham Act: likelihood of confusion, and dilution by blurring, a protection reserved for marks that have achieved a level of fame few brands ever attain. Louis Vuitton’s monogram, registered since the early twentieth century, sits comfortably within that category, and the company’s litigation history, multimillion-dollar judgments against counterfeiters, domain seizures and injunctions, reflects a brand that treats every unauthorised use as an erosion of exclusivity rather than a compliment. The legal question here is not whether a consumer would buy a fake believing it genuine, the traditional confusion inquiry, but whether the association itself, luxury handbag culture attached to a casino loyalty scheme, cheapens what the mark exists to signal.

What makes this dispute instructive is the deliberateness alleged. Continuing a substantially similar promotion after formal notice removes any credible argument of innocent adoption, and exposes the defendants to enhanced statutory damages and the prospect of treble damages for wilful infringement. For casinos, hotels and retailers increasingly leaning on “luxury” aesthetics to power loyalty programmes, the case is a pointed reminder that borrowed prestige carries borrowed liability.

Beyond the courtroom, the dispute exposes a widening frontier in enforcement: brand-adjacent loyalty marketing. Rewards ecosystems now function as informal retail channels, distributing thousands of branded-adjacent goods outside conventional points of sale, often without the legal scrutiny applied to ordinary merchandising or licensing deals. Louis Vuitton’s suit signals that luxury houses intend to treat these channels with the same rigour as counterfeit marketplaces, a shift that hospitality and retail brands building “premium” loyalty tiers would be wise to anticipate before their next giveaway goes to print.

For consumers, the case also illustrates what dilution law is actually built to protect: not their wallets, but the scarcity that luxury branding depends on. Every unauthorised “Live!” bag handed across a casino rewards counter chips away at the exclusivity that justifies the monogram’s price premium, irrespective of whether a single customer was ever actually deceived.

Because luxury isn’t just what a brand sells. It’s what a brand refuses to let anyone else give away for free.

Europe Redraws the Line Around Design

On 1 July 2026, the second and final phase of the European Union’s overhaul of design law took effect, and for the fashion industry the timing could not be more significant. Regulation (EU) 2024/2822 and its accompanying Directive (EU) 2024/2823, together with implementing rules adopted by the European Commission earlier in the year, complete a reform that began in May 2025. From this date, applicants can register entirely new categories of design at the EUIPO, including holographic, projected, virtual and augmented reality designs, dynamic and animated graphical user interfaces, and designs represented through video files rather than the old seven-static-image limit.

The legal significance runs deeper than procedural modernisation. EU design law has historically protected the “appearance of the whole or a part of a product,” a definition built around physical objects. Extending that definition to virtual and augmented reality creations effectively acknowledges that a garment’s appearance can now exist entirely inside a screen, a headset or a digital showroom, without ever touching fabric. This closes a gap that had previously left digital fashion houses, virtual wearables studios and augmented reality designers relying on the patchier protection offered by copyright and unregistered design rights, both considerably harder to enforce and much shorter lived.

For the fashion industry specifically, this matters on two fronts. First, digital-only collections, virtual try-on filters and augmented reality runway experiences can now obtain the same maximum twenty-five-year registered protection as a physical handbag, provided they satisfy the ordinary requirements of novelty and individual character. Second, applicants may now file up to fifty designs in a single application regardless of Locarno classification, sharply reducing the administrative cost of protecting an entire seasonal collection, digital and physical alike, in one filing.

The reform also introduces a repair clause excluding component parts used solely to restore a complex product’s original appearance from protection, a provision aimed principally at the automotive sector but with clear knock-on implications for accessories and hardware components in fashion, alongside simplified invalidity procedures intended to make challenging weak or speculative filings faster and cheaper for smaller designers.

Viewed internationally, the EU’s move puts pressure on other major design regimes. Neither the UK’s registered design system, the USPTO’s design patent framework, nor India’s Designs Act 2000 yet offers comparable protection for dynamic or immersive digital designs. Brands operating across jurisdictions will increasingly need parallel filing strategies: registering physical designs domestically while relying on the EU’s new categories for genuinely digital-first work, at least until other offices catch up to Europe’s lead.

The runway has moved into the metaverse, and European design law has finally followed it there.

What’s in a Vowel? Everything, Says Delhi High Court

On 6 July 2026, the Delhi High Court delivered judgment in a trademark dispute pitting Industria de Diseño Textil SA, the Spanish parent of ZARA, against a modest fabric trader operating out of Sadar Bazar, a wholesale textile market in Old Delhi. The registrant, who had used the mark “ZORA” since 2016 for polyester lining fabric sold to bag manufacturers and registered it in Class 24 in 2019, argued that his customers, industrial buyers of lining material, had no realistic prospect of confusing his product with a global fashion retailer. Justice Jyoti Singh disagreed, ordering cancellation of the ZORA registration.

The judgment turns on two doctrines central to Indian and comparative trademark law. First, the anti-dissection principle, which requires marks to be compared as a whole rather than broken into component sounds or letters, so that courts assess overall commercial impression rather than isolating the single vowel that technically distinguishes ZARA from ZORA. Second, and more consequential, the extended protection available to well-known marks under section 11(2) of the Trade Marks Act 1999, which allows a sufficiently famous mark to block registration even for dissimilar goods, departing from the ordinary rule that infringement requires confusion within the same or related product categories.

This second point is where the ruling earns its significance. Classical trademark doctrine ties protection to the risk of confusion at the point of sale. Well-known mark protection abandons that anchor entirely, guarding instead against dilution, the gradual erosion of a mark’s distinctiveness through unauthorised use anywhere in the marketplace, regardless of whether any customer is actually misled. A wholesale lining-fabric trader in Sadar Bazar was never going to be mistaken for a ZARA boutique, and the court did not pretend otherwise. What it protected was ZARA’s right to control what its name is allowed to mean across the entire spectrum of Indian commerce, textile to retail.

For India’s fashion and retail sector, still building out a trademark enforcement culture relative to more litigious markets, the decision sends an unambiguous signal to small and mid-sized manufacturers: registering a similar mark in an ostensibly unrelated class offers no safe harbour once a brand has crossed the threshold into “well-known” status. For emerging Indian labels and international entrants alike, the case doubles as a clearance lesson. Run searches beyond the immediate product category, because established brands increasingly will.

The ruling also arrives amid a broader wave of trademark activity at the Delhi High Court through July, including interim orders protecting BATA against counterfeiters and Dabur’s HAJMOLA mark against imitators, underscoring how actively Indian courts are now policing brand identity across sectors, from footwear to fast-moving consumer goods to fashion.

Because sometimes the smallest difference between two names is the biggest difference between winning and losing.

Dupe Culture Meets It’s Deadline

Since Lululemon Athletica filed suit against Costco Wholesale in the US District Court for the Central District of California in June 2025, the case has become the defining test of how far “dupe culture” can stretch before it crosses into unlawful copying. As of July 2026, the parties are working against a court-ordered private mediation deadline of 31 July, with a partial settlement already resolving claims tied to Danskin and Jockey branded outerwear manufactured by Jacques Moret. The core dispute, targeting Costco’s Kirkland Signature apparel line, remains very much alive, with a jury trial currently pencilled in for March 2027 should mediation fail.

Lululemon’s complaint rests on trade dress, the doctrine protecting a product’s overall visual appearance where that appearance functions to identify its source, alongside trademark infringement over terms such as “Scuba” and “Tidewater Teal,” and design patent infringement covering ornamental features of its hoodies and jackets. The company alleges that Costco’s cheaper alternatives to its Scuba hoodies, Define jackets and ABC pants replicate a distinctive combined look and feel closely enough to cause consumer confusion, or at minimum to trade unfairly on Lululemon’s accumulated goodwill.

The legal difficulty for Lululemon is that trade dress protection has firm limits. Functional features, those that affect cost, quality or how a garment performs, cannot be monopolised regardless of how recognisable they have become. Costco’s strongest defence will likely centre on functionality, arguing that stretch panelling, seam placement and pocket design serve practical purposes rather than acting as brand identifiers. Comparable disputes, including Tiffany’s long-running fight with Costco over the marketing of “Tiffany-style” engagement rings, illustrate how outcomes in this area hinge less on visual similarity and more on demonstrable evidence of actual consumer confusion or deliberate positioning designed to invite comparison.

The commercial stakes extend well beyond these two companies. Retailers building private-label ranges have leaned increasingly on close visual imitation of premium products, marketed openly online as “dupes,” a practice that thrives on social media virality precisely because it invites direct comparison to the original. Should Lululemon prevail, or extract a favourable settlement, brands across categories, from cosmetics to furniture, will gain a stronger template for challenging lookalike private-label ranges. Should Costco succeed on functionality grounds, dupe culture gains further legal breathing room, reinforcing that imitation without confusion remains, broadly speaking, lawful competition.

For licensing teams and product designers, the case is a live masterclass in documenting distinctiveness: proving that a design choice serves branding rather than function increasingly determines whether an entire product category can be protected at all.

If mediation fails by month’s end, discovery opens the door to Costco’s sales data, and dupe culture may finally get its day in open court.

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References:

1. Louis Vuitton Malletier SAS v PPE Casino Resorts Maryland LLC and The Cordish Companies (Complaint, US District Court for the District of Maryland, filed 1 June 2026).
2. CBS Baltimore, ‘Louis Vuitton sues Maryland Live! Casino for millions alleging promotion ripped off iconic logo, damaged brand’ (4 June 2026).
3. Lanham Act 1946, 15 USC §§ 1114, 1125(c).
4. Regulation (EU) 2024/2822 of the European Parliament and of the Council on Community designs [2024] OJ L.
5. Directive (EU) 2024/2823 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the legal protection of designs (recast) [2024] OJ L.
6. European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), ‘It is finally real – changes to EU design law start to take effect’ (2026).
7. EUIPO, ‘Design Reform Hub’ (2026).
8. industria de Diseño Textil SA v ZORA Registrant (Delhi High Court, judgment dated 6 July 2026) (unreported).
9. Trade Marks Act 1999, s 11(2).