Capri vs. Capri: Shoddy Goods 071
An Italian island fights a cigarette brand over their name
Can a place sue to take their name off of a brand? Hey, I’m Jason Toon. Come fly with me to the isle of Capri for this week’s Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture. But if you know what’s good for you, you’ll observe the NO SMOKING signs.
You’ve come the wrong way, baby?
Since Caesar Augustus decided to make it his permanent vacation home in 29 BC, the island of Capri has been the A-list playground of all A-list playgrounds. Jutting dramatically up out of the sapphire-blue sea just off the coast of Naples, this tiny 4-square-mile shard of paradise has lured every famous name from Lenin to J-Lo.
And it seems like for almost that long, people have been naming products after it. Capri pants, of course, were made famous by the glamorous likes of Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot. Several car models have taken the name, most notably the Ford Capri, a sporty ‘70s coupe recently revived in Europe as a compact crossover electric SUV. There’s Capri Sun, Generation X’s favorite juice drink, several bands called the Capris, and countless hotels, casinos, and theaters.
All of these businesses are trying to evoke a sort of effortless style, a timeless luxury, a self-indulgent, sun-splashed, carefree, quintessentially Italian vibrance - and in turn, they’ve spread that reputation for the namesake island. It’s a symbiotic relationship that works for both sides.
But what if the people of Capri decided they’d rather not be associated with a certain product? Do they get a say in the matter?
17 millimeters of satisfaction
When tobacco behemoth Brown and Williamson acquired the brand from the now-defunct Lee Brothers, the cigarettes were known as Capri Rainbows for their multicolored papers. That gimmick didn’t exactly set the world on fire, and B&W lost the rainbows and turned it into a ho-hum, underperforming menthol brand.
Then came the rival Virginia Slims, a narrower cigarette “for her”. Its rise in the 1970s and 1980s made the industry realize there was gold in using a pseudo-feminist pitch to get more women addicted to nicotine. And hey, if the “slim” marketing happened to imply smoking them might make you thinner, well, you could hardly blame the tobacco companies for that, right? They can’t control what goes on in people’s heads.
So in 1986, Brown and Williamson aimed to one-up Virginia Slims with an even thinner ultra-slim cigarette, reviving their dormant Capri brand to do it.
WARNING: Use of this product increases the risk of kicky hats
The new Capris weren’t just skinny, they were downright emaciated: where a normal cigarette had a circumference of 25mm and Virginia Slims were at 23mm, Capris were just 17 millimeters around. An extra-long “luxury length” version accented the slimness even more, as did slogans like “The slimmest slim in town” and “There’s no slimmer way to smoke.”
With the help of saturation advertising - in two senses, with the electric ‘80s color palette of the ads - it worked. The toothpick-esque Capri became a best-selling cigarette brand in 60 countries. But going thin wasn’t the only trend affecting the tobacco industry at the time…
Butts in a name?
As in the rest of the Western world, Italy had seen falling smoking rates among men, from more than 70% in 1950 to less than 50% in 1980 - but an increase among women during the same period, from 10% to 20%. The overall rate was still falling, but as health officials and governments learned more and more about just how deadly smoking was, policy responses followed. The first official anti-smoking programs launched in Italy in 1981 and proliferated through the decade and beyond..
One of the government bodies that signed on in 1988 was the municipality of Capri, the local authority for about a third of the island’s territory and 60% of its population. I assume seeing their town’s name on cigarette packages must have seemed a little counterproductive.
“Antismoking mask” printed in Italian comics, to “put on when Dad smokes”, which probably got Dads to stop buying comics
In May 1989, Capri filed suit in Rome against Brown and Williamson, seeking to force the company to stop marketing cigarettes in Italy under the Capri name. Their case argued that they had the right to veto products that cast their locale in a negative light.
B&W, for their part, argued that they’d followed “all applicable laws in securing rights to use the Capri name in Italy and in other countries where the brand is sold,” as company spokesperson Valerie Oates put it. (A typo in the Associated Press story has immortalized her forever as “Valeris Oates”, but I checked, her name is “Valerie”.)
Now, it’s true that geographical names are not intellectual property in and of themselves. If you want to call your Mexican restaurant “Guadalajara” or sell sweatshirts that say “New York”, you’re free to do so. If you’re implying that the product was made in that location, you can get in trouble under appellation and place-of-origin laws. But that’s a different thing. Nobody was accusing Brown and Williamson of misrepresenting the cigarettes as being made in Capri. This was purely about whether they had the right to associate Capri with smoking.
Never let it be said that the Italian legal system, or really any legal system, arrives at decisions in undue haste. This lawsuit went on for 11 years, eventually reaching the highest court in Italy, the Supreme Court of Cassation.
They must be the bad guys - look at those leather gloves
In December 2000, the high court ruled in favor of Brown and Williamson - but with a twist. Because the Capri tobacco trademark had already been awarded before the municipality of Capri initiated its anti-smoking programs, the court declined to overturn the trademark or force B&W to stop marketing the cigarettes. In other words, maybe things would be different if B&W were first applying for the Capri trademark after the municipality of Capri had officially come out against smoking. Or maybe not.
By making it a matter of timing, the court sidestepped the fundamental question of whether the government of a place had the right to keep its name from being used for products it disapproved of. As far as I can find, there’s never been another case like it, and place-of-origin cases aside, nobody has ever been prevented from using a place name as a brand. Capri cigarettes remain on the market today. But still, I’d be careful about, say, naming your new brand of toxic sludge after your favorite vacation spot. Daytona Dioxin might raise a few eyebrows down in Florida.
Ok, I admit I thought this was going to be about Capri pants, and I was going to have to come up with a hot take on the exact right length of a pants leg. Instead, how about we talk about who’s been to Italy? I’ve never been to the island of Capri, but I once spent a day, but not a night in Venice, because the hotels were all too pricey. Let’s hear about your travels in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
The only risk with these stories from the Shoddy Goods archive is that you may be excessively infotained: