> Today’s read: 5 minutes
This week’s stories come against a landscape in which years of outsized luxury growth normalizes, putting questions about brand reach, control, and resilience firmly back at the forefront. As demand cools, price sensitivity rises, and luxury and consumer sectors enter a more revealing phase, brands are testing how much protection the law will actually afford once offerings move beyond clear-cut infringement. We are seeing this play out with regard to legacy marks, functional designs, and products designed to echo, rather than copy.
This week’s reporting shows that …
— Trademark abandonment questions turn on whether marks continue to function as source identifiers, rather than solely on active product sales.
— Famous brands are testing the outer limits of trademark reach, leaning on fame and dilution theories to police adjacent categories.
— EU design rights remain strong but are limited by function and context.
— Dupe culture is testing the line between intentional similarity and deception.
— As growth slows, brand enforcement is being shaped by financial pressure and consumer price sensitivity.
— Brand power is exercised through credit, inventory, and restructuring leverage as retail partners weaken.
A few of the most consequential trademark disputes right now are not about who copied whom, but whether a mark still exists in a legally meaningful way. Recent cases involving legacy brands underscore a judicial shift away from indicators like active manufacturing or continuous registration. Instead, courts are asking whether a mark continues to function as a source identifier through domains, licensing, enforcement activity, resale ecosystems, and cultural persistence.
The disputes surrounding X Corp.’s continued rights in TWITTER and Nike’s defense of TOTAL 90 reflect this approach. Rebranding, lapses in registration, or reduced prominence are no longer dispositive. What matters is whether the mark retains commercial significance in the minds of consumers.
For challengers, that raises the evidentiary bar. For brand owners, it raises the stakes of portfolio management. In a crowded market where valuable marks are in demand, secondary marks require deliberate management. Ferrari’s after-market activity on the Testarossa front is instructive.
>> At the other end of the spectrum, Tiffany & Co.’s recent bid to block a coffee-related trademark application shows how aggressively heritage brands continue to test the outer limits of brand reach. Rather than defending a dormant or secondary mark, Tiffany is relying on the breadth and longevity of the TIFFANY name itself, arguing that consumers could reasonably be confused by an unaffiliated TIFFANY’S COFFEE product. The implication is that consumers could reasonably expect the brand to extend into adjacent lifestyle categories.
The move sheds light on a parallel trend: as enforcement becomes less clear at the edges, famous brands are leaning more heavily on fame, portfolio depth, and dilution theories to shape how far their names travel.
The Brussels Court of Appeal’s recent ruling in a case over Longchamp’s Le Pliage design reinforces a line EU courts have been drawing: EU design rights remain powerful, but they cannot be used to monopolize functional features or leap across fundamentally different product contexts.
By rejecting the handbag-maker’s infringement claim while upholding the validity of its hot-selling design, the court struck a familiar but important balance. Creative choices embedded in functional accessories remain protectable, but once technically-dictated features are stripped away, enforcement turns on overall impression, market context, and use.
For fashion and accessories brands, the message is this: design registrations still matter, but courts will not stretch them to support overly expansive enforcement.
Dupe culture remains one of the most volatile legal terrains (despite my efforts to write about other things). The Trader Joe’s “Uncrustables” lawsuit, the expanding slate of cases against Five Below, Aldi’s long-running packaging disputes, and Sol de Janeiro’s escalating case against MCoBeauty are not isolated events. Together, they reflect mounting pressure on dupe-driven strategies that have become increasingly visible.
The Uncrustables case, in particular, raises broader questions about the limits of Trader Joe’s private-label playbook. While food-related trade dress disputes are not new, the lawsuit arrives as Trader Joe’s draws heightened attention for lookalike products beyond grocery, especially in beauty and personal care. What once operated quietly as “inspiration” is now openly framed – by consumers and the media alike – as substitution.
As side-by-side comparisons proliferate and dupe products are routinely positioned as stand-ins for specific branded goods, the legal analysis starts to shift. Where consumers understand they are buying dupes, confusion may be unlikely. This is an argument MCoBeauty is pressing forcefully. That is not to say that explicit substitution can still strengthen other theories, including dilution.
What makes the MCoBeauty dispute especially telling is the company’s defense. Rather than denying similarity, it argues that dupe culture is transparent, normalized, and understood as something other than deception. Influencer comparisons and consumer scent perceptions, it contends, are subjective and non-actionable. That framing mirrors a broader question courts are confronting: whether trademark and advertising law extend to deliberate competition that is not misleading.
The pressing question is not whether dupes will disappear, but whether highly visible, explicitly comparative dupe strategies will ultimately withstand sustained legal scrutiny as brand owners push back to protect the visual and commercial identities they have many spent years – and cash – building.
Overlaying all of this is a sobering commercial backdrop. LVMH’s 2025 results – showing declines in revenue and profit after years of outsized growth – make clear that even the strongest brand portfolios are not immune to normalization, regional softness, and shifting consumer behavior. While its robust Fashion and Leather Goods category remains highly profitable, margins are tightening. Selective Retailing, led by Sephora, is doing the heavy lifting. Wines and Spirits continue to face structural headwinds.
The context matters: As growth slows, brand equity becomes more valuable and more aggressively defended. At the same time, price pressure is pushing consumers toward alternatives, whether through resale, dupes – or prioritizing other discretionary spending categories altogether.
That dynamic is not limited to litigation. Saks Global’s Chapter 11 proceedings show how brand power is being exercised through financial leverage rather than court filings. The newly formed creditors committee – stacked with luxury giants like Chanel, LVMH, and Kering, alongside Amazon – shows just how dependent major retailers have become on the brands they carry. As Saks seeks approval to pay “critical” vendors (with the foregoing names likely on that not-yet-disclosed list) and restructure billions in debt, the case shows how brands gain leverage through credit and inventory control when retail partners falter.
>> This Week’s TL/DR: Some of the hardest fights are happening outside clear-cut infringement, as companies seek to shape – and courts are being tasked with defining – the limits of protectable brand rights.