This is about trademarks on labels in
vintage fashion.
Anyone who loves vintage and wants
ONLY true vintage should be familiar with trademarks on labels.
I am amazed at what sellers of vintage
sell AS vintage but they are so WRONG about their dating. (I could go on and on about the 80’s and how
so many eras were reproduced back then and someday I will).
It should be a “given” that sellers
know all about what they are selling, but too many of them don’t . Here’s how you can be smarter than the
seller.
Be a Vintage Fashion Detective.
The best site for trademarks is called
trademarkia.com (link below).
The only thing is, you have to know how
to use it.
First does the item listing SHOW the
label? It’s not enough to mention them. They must be shown! Many companies use several different logos during
their history of production. Some use
only one and then go out of business. So you need to see the label to know if and when
it was registered.
If it has an “R” or a “TM” next to the
logo, you know it has been officially trademarked or registered for a
trademark.
So go to
Then put in the name exactly as it
appears on the label. It’s picky, so if
it doesn’t come up the first time, you may have to enter it in different ways
(like adding all the dots and dashes if they exist on the logo, but it’s not
case-sensitive)
NOTE:
if there is no TM or R by the name, the label could be from before it
was trademarked or registered, or was never TM’d or registered at all. Sometimes you will be sent straight to a page
where it tells you how to get a trademark for whatever item you are searching.
That means it's time to give it up and find
another way to date your item…..
Sometimes, certain names are used over
and over so there may be 40 pages or more of that name, but in different logos
and fonts. Be patient, look through all
of them until you find a matching logo.
Sometimes they don’t have photos of some logos , but it will tell you
what the company sells.
Like, if you looking for women’s clothing,
you can skip the sellers of baked goods or automobile parts….
When you find it, click on the logo
(or lack of one) then scroll down. It
will tell you when this logo was first used, but not official yet. A lot of companies use logos that are not
officially trademarked until they apply for it.
This is very important because
the date it was first used (no officially registered trademark) doesn’t mean
the item is that old! As a fellow member
of the Vintage Fashion Guild once stated, “Beware of the common mistake of
confusing “oldest it can be” with actual age.”
So then scroll back up and check the
filing date and most important, the registration date. On top of the page you will see if it was
renewed or cancelled. If it was
cancelled, you would know that the item can be no newer than the cancellation
date.
OK. This was informative but not as entertaining as I would like it to be. So for once "school is in".
All this can be time-consuming but
many find this research is big fun. It
pays to be knowledgeable about what you are buying. Imagine going to a yard sale or an estate
sale and when the seller tries to tell you that the dress is from the 1940s,
you can throw it back at them and tell them you know better because:
There are lots of other ways to tell the
age!
What are the shoulder pads like?
Are they
triangles? 40s to 50s
Are they shaped like a half of a pie
and really thick? 80s
Are they flat triangles with a rounded
edge? 70s.
Shoulder pads were not in style through
the 60s.
Zipper:
Metal zipper on the side? 30s 40s to early 50s
Metal zipper in the back? Mid 50s to mid 60s
Acrylic or nylon zippers? Mid 60s to present
“Invisible” zippers? 70s to present
So there you go. You are on your way to being a Vintage
Fashion Detective of the highest order!
