The IP Runway: Issue No. 13
Intellectual property insights for the global business of fashion.
When a Founding Date Becomes a Claim the Law Can Question
Edition thirteen is about a year: 1717.
On September 23, France’s highest court ended a legal fight between two Parisian leather goods houses that began in 2012. The question was whether a date inside a trademark can mislead shoppers about a brand’s past.
The case, fast
Goyard is widely regarded as one of the oldest luxury leather goods houses still in continuous operation. Its rival, Fauré Le Page Paris, is a much younger company. It was established in 2009, and that same year acquired the rights to the Fauré Le Page name, which had passed down through another company from Maison Fauré Le Page, a historic Parisian arms maker that stopped trading in 1992.
In 2011, the newer company filed two French trademarks reading “Fauré Le Page Paris 1717,” covering handbags, trunks, suitcases, and travel bags. On October 26, 2012, Goyard went to court. Its argument: the date would lead shoppers to believe the brand had made leather goods without interruption since 1717, and had inherited the craftsmanship that comes with that history.
Fauré Le Page’s answer was that a date, like a designer’s name, describes the company rather than the product. Before the highest court, it argued that a mark can be annulled only for misleading shoppers about the goods, not about the qualities of the company behind them.
A company established in 2009, a trademark that said 1717, and a rival that went to court over the gap.
How a date reached the EU’s top court
The case went through the French courts for years. The Paris Court of Appeal found the marks deceptive. In 2024, the Cour de cassation, France’s highest court in civil and commercial matters, sent a question to the Court of Justice of the European Union.
On March 26, 2026, the EU court answered. A trademark can be deceptive when an old date inside the sign leads consumers to believe in long-standing know-how and prestige that do not exist. The misleading element must relate to a characteristic of the goods, and quality counts beyond physical features.
Then, on September 23, the Cour de cassation applied that test. It rejected Fauré Le Page’s appeal and upheld a 2021 Paris appeal ruling that invalidated both marks. The appeal court had found that “Paris 1717” evokes the place and date of the company’s creation, and leads the public to believe in continuous operation since 1717 and a handed-down craft. According to French legal analyses of the decision, the court pointed to the break in activity: the old house stopped trading in 1992, and the 2009 company was created to acquire and exploit trademarks. It rejected the arguments that buying the old name transferred its history, and that the real quality of the bags cured the problem. It was not the exact year that misled, those analyses note, but the unbroken craft the year suggests.
The court did not ban dates. It said a date that tells shoppers a story that isn’t true can cost you the trademark.
Why this matters beyond one handbag
“Since 17xx” is one of luxury’s favorite sentences. Revived houses, relaunched names, and archive-inspired labels often lean on heritage. This ruling says the heritage placed inside a trademark has to match the business behind it.
The test is about what shoppers are led to believe, not whether the product is good. A well-made bag did not repair a misleading story.
The exposure starts at filing. French lawyers describe the rule as applying from the day a mark is registered, not only to later marketing. A brand that locks a prestigious date into its trademark has made that claim from the start.
A second ruling the same day pointed the same way. In the Castelbajac case, the Cour de cassation confirmed that a designer-name brand forfeited rights over part of its goods and services, because how it used the name between 2017 and 2019 wrongly suggested the designer was still involved. Different facts, same message.
Reading the runway
Almost fourteen years, several rounds in the French courts, one EU judgment, and the outcome turned on a year a shopper reads in a second.
Luxury sells time. The ruling does not stop brands from honoring history. It asks them to be truthful about whose history it is.
More soon.
The IP Runway
Sources: Stevens & Bolton LLP, Marks & Clerk, Lux Juris, Luxus Plus, LoupedIn, and analyses by French law firms Kohen Avocats and Philippe Schmitt Avocats, which cite the Cour de cassation decision of September 23, 2026 (appeal no. 22-11.499) and CJEU Case C-412/24.
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