Will Marc Jacobs Sue Justin Bieber?
By
June 1, 2011
BIEBER’S “SOMEDAY” BOTTLE (LEFT); JACOBS’ “LOLA” BOTTLE (RIGHT).
IMAGES VIA JUSTINBIEBERSOMEDAY.COM AND MARCJACOBS.COM
Much of the hype surrounding Justin Bieber’s much-anticipated debut fragrance, Someday, has been of the amused-but-affectionate variety. (We, in fact, were among those who couldn’t resist commenting on the exposively silly 30-second ad for the trailer, which featured Bieber floating in space with Dree Hemingway and, at one point, giving her an airborne piggyback ride.) But now that Someday is sort of available (in a “limited-edition fan exclusive,” which does not seem very exclusive to us—the full line is still 18 days away from being available in stores), it’s garnering headlines of a different type: murmurs of possible copyright infringement, since the Someday bottle looks so similar to the bottle for Marc Jacobs’ Lola fragrance. Bellasugar noted earlier this month that the bottle—specifically, the bright, Pop-art plastic flower top—looks suspiciously similar to Jacobs’. So will the designer sue?
In an interview with Jacobs timed to his receipt of the CFDA’s Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award, WWD‘s Bridget Foley delicately brought it up, asking whether Jacobs had seen Bieber’s bottle and whether it reminded him of anything. Jacobs’ response? “Yep, yep. We just had a conversation about it. Coty said, ‘Do we sue them?’ and I said, ‘You know what? Let everyone else say what they want.’ … We’re not going to do anything about it.”
Though Jacobs admitted he’d received Google Alerts suggesting the bottle design was derivative of his own, he had elegant reasoning for why he’s choosing not to sue. “I look around the room and I look at the work we’ve done,” he told Foley, “and a quote I always bastardize but I really believe in, is something Chanel said: ‘He who insists on his own creativity has no memory.'” A fitting mindset on the eve of a Lifetime Achievement Award, we’d say—and a classy decision.
[Bellasugar, WWD, Someday]
