Valentino, the Rockstud pumps and the issue of exclusivity in fashion

Originally introduced in 2010, under the double reign of Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri, Valentino's Rockstud pumps have become one of the brand's hero products over the years. According to The Fashion Law, the sandals generated earnings of 152 million dollars in the period between 2014 and 2019 alone, going sold-out season after season and also becoming the protagonists of the FW16 campaign of the brand shot by Terry Richardson. Yet, despite the fact that the Rockstuds have been "a mainstay on store shelves for over a decade," as can be read in Valentino's filing at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week, American judges decided that the sandal did not have enough distinctive elements to be registered. 

According to the attorney who examined the case, the studs are "merely a decorative or ornamental feature of [Valentino’s products] and, thus, does not function as a trademark to indicate the source of [Valentino’s products]". To which the brand's lawyers responded by asserting that the extraordinary commercial success of the shoe demonstrated the distinctiveness of the design – an argument that made little hold on the Trademark Office which further emphasized that square studs are too common to become the trademark of a single brand. In his response to this rejection, in a 227-page long response, Valentino's lawyers also cited Christian Louboutin's famous 2011 lawsuit against Saint Laurent for the use of the red sole in its footwear – a lawsuit won by Louboutin after he presented his advertising budgets, the media coverage of his campaigns and those of his own sales demonstrating the distinctiveness assumed by the red colour of his own sole. In the same document, Valentino's lawyers compare the success of Louboutin shoes to the Rockstud. 

The filings for the trademark of the Rockstud sandals, one for the flat version and the other for the heeled version, remain open to this day. Meanwhile, the relative simplicity of the sandal design has meant that many imitations produced by fast fashion or high street brands have appeared over the years: precisely what Valentino would like to avoid with the registration of the trademark. The most striking case of all was in 2016, when ASOS put on the market a sandal almost identical to the one by Valentino, prompting the English newspaper The Sun to title with perhaps unconscious irony: "The £600 Valentino heels that every celeb wants to be seen in… and the £45 ASOS pair that look just like them".