HONG KONG -- A crocodile logo on polo shirts and other clothes is turning out to be as coveted as the real reptile's skin in a lawsuit being tried in Hong Kong.
The French clothing company La Chemise Lacoste, maker of the status symbol polo shirts with crocodile appliques, is fighting Hong Kong's Crocodile Garments Ltd., which has a crocodile logo that, according to Lacoste, has too close a resemblance to Lacoste's well-known beast.Rekindling a decades-old feud, the privately held French company is asking a judge to order Crocodile to withdraw its application to register its own reptile logo as a trademark in mainland China. Lacoste also wants monetary damages that its lawyers have not specified.
Michel Lacoste, director of the company founded by his champion tennis player father, Rene Lacoste, testified Tuesday that Hong Kong-based Crocodile violated a 1980 agreement on the use of the trademark in Hong Kong and mainland China.
Known in the U.S. for the "alligator shirt," an icon of preppy style in its heyday, the Lacoste family company chose the reptile, which is actually a crocodile, to depict the tennis player's nickname "Le Crocodile."
The battle over claims to the crocodile began in the 1970s when Lacoste began distributing its shirts and other clothing in Hong Kong.
The local Crocodile company had already been in business for decades. It had originally secured a Hong Kong trademark registration for its namesake reptile crawling out of a swamp in 1910 and began using a left-facing profile of a crocodile as a logo in the 1950s.
In 1979, after Lacoste came to town, the Hong Kong company sued the French company over its use in Hong Kong of Lacoste's green, right-facing crocodile logo.
The companies settled the next year with a deal that gives Crocodile the exclusive rights in Hong Kong to use the Lacoste trademark and sell the French company's goods.
Crocodile can also sell its own crocodile goods here. But as part of the deal, Lacoste says, Hong Kong-based Crocodile cannot use a logo "confusingly similar" to Lacoste's crocodile emblem anywhere outside of Hong Kong. Lacoste insists the local crocodile logo is covered by that ban.
But the Hong Kong company, which applied in 1993 for a Chinese trademark on its own crocodile logo, says it has agreed only to refrain from using Lacoste's exact trademark outside Hong Kong.