adidas v. Thom Browne: How a Four-Bar Stripe Beat the Three Stripes

On 12 January 2023, a Manhattan jury took less than two hours to decide a dispute that had run for years. It found that Thom Browne Inc. neither infringed nor diluted adidas’s Three-Stripe mark by putting four horizontal bars on tailored clothing. adidas had asked for $867,225 in lost licensing fees plus more than $7 million in profits. The jury awarded nothing, and the verdict made the case one of the most closely watched trademark disputes in recent fashion litigation.

adidas v. Thom Browne: The Marks at Issue

adidas has used its three parallel stripes as its principal brand identifier throughout its history, and it defends them aggressively. According to court documents in this case, the company filed more than 90 lawsuits and signed more than 200 settlement agreements over the Three-Stripe mark between 2008 and 2023. Thom Browne’s counterpart is the Four-Bar Signature, a motif of four wide parallel bars that the designer debuted in 2008, as Trademark Lawyer Magazine reports, alongside a grosgrain ribbon pattern that adidas also challenged.

A Dispute That Predates the Lawsuit

The two companies had met before. In 2007, adidas complained that a Thom Browne jacket carried a three-stripe design too close to its own, and Browne agreed to stop and moved to four stripes. A decade later the dispute resurfaced. adidas opened an opposition proceeding in 2018 against Browne’s European application for a four-stripe mark.

adidas sued in June 2021 in the Southern District of New York, claiming trademark infringement, dilution and unfair competition over Browne’s use of the Four-Bar and the grosgrain pattern on a new line of activewear. The case is adidas America, Inc. v. Thom Browne, Inc., No. 1:21-cv-05615. Browne answered with 18 affirmative defences and a counterclaim seeking to cancel one of adidas’s three-stripe registrations.

adidas v. Thom Browne: The Trial

Judge Jed Rakoff narrowed the case before the jury heard it. He granted adidas summary judgment on Browne’s defence that adidas had abandoned its mark and dismissed the acquiescence and estoppel parts of another defence, but he left the laches defence for trial. The trial opened on 3 January 2023.

adidas argued that the number of stripes did not matter, because shoppers would link Browne’s clothing to adidas anyway, and it described the Four-Bar as a targeted attempt to grow Browne’s sportswear business. Browne’s lawyers answered with a closing line that stuck: adidas “does not own stripes.” Browne himself wore four-stripe socks to court on the first day and told the Associated Press afterwards that it was important to fight and tell his story.

Why the Jury Sided With Browne

A verdict form does not explain itself, but the findings are clear. The jury rejected both infringement and dilution, which means it concluded that shoppers would not mistake Browne’s tailored goods for adidas products and that the Four-Bar did not weaken the Three-Stripe mark. Trademark Lawyer Magazine reads the dilution finding as a sign the jury saw no consumer confusion about the clothing’s origin.

Commentators also credited the way Browne’s team framed the story. A legal analyst quoted by the Associated Press noted that Browne’s lawyers persuaded jurors to see him as the underdog in a fight against a corporation. The same analyst observed that as long as Browne kept the stripes on sport coats and narrow luxury goods, with only the occasional pair of sweatpants, the two brands never crossed streams.

The Appeals

adidas appealed, arguing in part that Judge Rakoff gave the jury incorrect instructions on how to gauge consumer confusion. It also asked for a new trial after discovering four emails that Browne’s side had not disclosed during discovery. The Second Circuit refused to disturb the verdict, and it later affirmed the denial of a new trial in a decision the court docketed as No. 24-1510.

What the Case Settled and What It Did Not

The verdict settles one dispute between two companies on one set of facts. It does not take stripes out of adidas’s hands. The company’s registrations stand, and its record shows the range of outcomes a stripe case can produce. FLJ’s analysis of adidas v. Skechers notes that adidas won a $305 million judgment against Payless in 2008 over similar three-stripe designs, while the Skechers litigation produced mixed results. Thom Browne now sits on the other side of that ledger.

The Thom Browne loss also fits a wider pattern. Euronews notes that the verdict was not adidas’s first recent defeat over its stripes. In Europe, the EU Intellectual Property Office found that adidas had not adequately proved the distinctiveness of its three-stripe mark in a dispute with the Belgian company Shoe Branding Europe, because part of the evidence showed two white stripes on black trousers instead of the mark adidas was defending. The fight with Browne also continued abroad, where his company asked the High Court in London to invalidate a portfolio of adidas’s UK Three-Stripe registrations in a case reported as [2024] EWHC 2990 (Ch).

The pattern across those cases explains the outcome here. The strength of the mark and the similarity of the designs decide a stripe dispute. A luxury tailor selling four wide bars on a sport coat looked different to eight jurors than a discount retailer selling three narrow stripes on sneakers.