Rihanna today won a landmark legal battle to ban Topshop from selling a T-shirt that has her face on it.
Three Appeal Court judges ruled the singer’s fans might have been deceived into thinking she had approved the sleeveless top.
But the image was from an unauthorised photograph taken while she shot a video in Northern Ireland for single We Found Love in 2011. The judges ruled Topshop “passed off” the T-shirt in breach of the star’s trademark rights.
Legal sources say the ruling has major implications for the multi-billion-pound merchandising market and for celebrity image rights.
The case saw Court 68 at the Royal Courts of Justice transformed into a shopping mall, with rails of multi-coloured T-shirts wheeled in to allow barristers to point out fashion features to the judges.
Topshop was appealing against an earlier High Court decision that it had been guilty of passing off Rihanna’s image.
Geoffrey Hobbs, representing the retailer, which is part of the Arcadia Group, said the “decorated T-shirt” was in a decades-old tradition of merchandising star images such as Elvis, Jimi Hendrix and Prince.
But Lord Justice Kitchin, sitting with Lord Justices Richards and Underhill, said: “A substantial number of consumers were likely to be deceived by buying the T-shirt because of a false belief it had been authorised by Rihanna.
Rihanna, 26, who brought the case with others under her real name Robyn Rihanna Fenty, was not in court for today’s ruling.
