Two luxury giants, a four-petal shape, and an almost 10-year-long battle. That is the synopsis of what ensued relentlessly for nearly a decade between Louis Vuitton and Van Cleef & Arpels. Both heritage luxury houses locked horns over the four-leaf clover, and it turned into a game of who did it first. It should be known that the plaintiffs Richemont International and Cartier, argued that Louis Vuitton’s Color Blossom jewelry was a case of “parasitic competition,” unfairly riding on the reputation and massive investment behind Van Cleef & Arpels’ Alhambra line.
The clover wars commenced in 2015, when the Van Cleef side found Louis Vuitton selling a new jewelry collection called Monogram, renamed Blossom a few months later, and that some of the pieces used a quadrilobed semi-precious-stone motif with a precious-metal outline. This set alarm bells ringing in the VCA universe. It was not just discussions and venting sessions, but a formal notice was then sent to Louis Vuitton on May 10, 2016, after which Richemont and Cartier later sued through acts dated September 12, 2017, and July 13, 2018.
Things got pretty heated, as the accusers were not just stopping at the Alhambra line or the shape of the motif, but insisted the entire line was based on their design language, using a matching 31-piece quadrilobed structure, reusing the same semi-precious-stone colors, the same three size tiers, shadow-pricing against Alhambra, and borrowing Van Cleef’s communication codes. But it seems time, including the years that had passed, was on Louis Vuitton’s side, as the luxury giant proved it had a registered floral quadrilobed mark filed on February 23, 1996, under No. 96 612 504, including for jewelry, and that its Monogram canvas had already used floral and quadrilobed motifs since 1896. There was little left to argue, as Color Blossom could be seen as growing out of Vuitton’s own house language rather than Alhambra, technically an older jeweller than Louis Vuitton, the older maison.
The court, in fact, went a step further and showed how the LV motif was different and did not blatantly pick off Alhambra’s features. It clarified that Color Blossom was not openworked, had no beaded setting, was not double-sided, and used a stone that was not smooth and included a central element, unlike Alhambra. Simply calling it a copy of the ecosystem was not enough, and that argument went against the accusers, as the court actually ripped the “systematic copying” theory apart piece by piece.
Even the 31-piece argument fell flat when, upon perusal, it was revealed that Van Cleef & Arpels had 190 Alhambra pieces against 96 Color Blossom pieces. Still, it is interesting to note that in 2021, the Paris Commercial Court ruled that LV’s designs were too similar to the Alhambra collection and ordered LV to pay almost $250,000 in damages and stop selling the contested pieces. Not one to back down without a fight, Louis Vuitton appealed and got the Paris Court of Appeal to reverse the previous ruling. According to Legifrance, the four-petal shape was treated as a broader design element in jewelry, while LV’s use was seen as an extension of its own historical monogram rather than an attempt to steal VCA’s thunder.
By the final stage of the case, Richemont had sharply raised the stakes, seeking a ban on 31 Louis Vuitton Blossom pieces, about $11.6 million for Cartier, about $5.8 million for Richemont, and even a notice posted on Louis Vuitton’s homepage, showing that the dispute had grown far beyond a simple design quarrel. The final verdict came this time last year, on March 5, when the French Court of Cassation officially dismissed Richemont’s final appeal, and LV was even awarded almost $60,000 in legal costs.
The battle proved that in luxury, territory is everything. Interestingly, while LV won the clover, the Richemont group saw a separate victory in 2022 when they successfully got Louis Vuitton’s trademark for the word “Vendome” canceled for jewelry, proving that these two giants are constantly fighting for every inch of the luxury landscape. Louis Vuitton (est. 1854) and Van Cleef & Arpels (est. 1906) remain titans of their craft, but this case showed that when two such symbols overlap, the law favors those who can prove their DNA goes back the furthest.
