Louboutin SA asked a U.S. appeals court to stop Yves Saint Laurent America from selling red-soled shoes that it claims violates its trademark.
Louboutin requested that the appeals panel overturn U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero’s decision in August rejecting the company’s bid to prevent Yves Saint Laurent from selling shoes Louboutin said were identical to its own. At a hearing following that ruling, Marrero said he would defer deciding whether to cancel Louboutin’s red-sole trademark until the appeals court ruled on the injunction.
“We don’t claim shades of red,” Harley Lewin, a lawyer for Louboutin, told the three appeals judges yesterday in Manhattan. “We don’t claim anything but the mark as registered.”
The judges said they will rule later.
“There are far-reaching principles in this case,” U.S. Circuit Judge Chester Straub said in court. “Color can be trademarked. Here the district judge said in this case it can’t be. What findings did he make? I can’t find it.”
Yves Saint Laurent, the company named for the designer who died in 2008, began selling shoes with red outsoles “long before Mr. Louboutin began using them,” David Bernstein, a lawyer for the company, told Marrero at a hearing in July. YSL is a unit of Paris-based PPR, which owns other luxury brands including Gucci.
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