Steve Madden and Cult Gaia’s Battle Over Trade Dress

Steve Madden and Cult Gaia are wading into the legal trenches over an eternal question in the design wars: Is there an actual intellectual property right at stake?   The subject is Cult Gaia’s Ark bag, a basket bag with a semicircle base and a skeletal frame of bamboo radiating like spokes on a wheel. Steve Madden sued Cult Gaia last year, trying to get the court to hold that the style is not protected by trade dress and is free for anyone to use. Los Angeles-based Cult Gaia fired back that the brand’s celebrity clientele helped launch the bag into a coveted trend now decidedly associated with its name. It argued Steve Madden’s similar-looking BShipper bag is an imitation, more importantly, one that infringes on its trade dress. The bags’ similarity might seem obvious, but that’s where the issue getting tricky. Designers seldom agree in court on what actually qualifies as protectable trade dress — and it could be almost anything, including design, configuration, size, shape and even the color of product. Steve Madden isn’t arguing that the bags aren’t similar — to the contrary, he concedes they sell an “identical style of bag,” but argues that Cult Gaia nonetheless

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