Adidas is chasing more than a legal victory in its Federal Court dispute with Australian online retailer White Fox. The German sportswear giant is seeking orders that would bar the fast-fashion label from making clothing bearing four stripes and force it to hand over the profits earned on those products. The financial stakes are considerable on both sides: White Fox generated $542m in revenue in the year to June 2025, while Adidas posted a record $39.9bn in 2025.
The action, filed in September, accuses the Sydney-based company of infringing a trademark Adidas has held in Australia for more than 50 years. Adidas argues that White Fox’s four-stripe design is deceptively similar to its classic three-stripe mark, and that the boutique has rejected repeated requests to stop selling and promoting the clothing in question. The dispute had its first mention on Friday, where Adidas’s barrister Patrick Flynn SC argued the company had been using the stripes as a trademark for months.
For Flynn, the case turns on commercial intent. He pointed to a promotion featuring a White Fox-endorsed influencer wearing the label’s four-stripe shorts alongside genuine Adidas shoes, an image he argued would confuse consumers. “There’s an intention to trade off our reputation,” Flynn told the court. He also noted that Adidas had successfully sued another retailer over shoes bearing four stripes in 2013, meaning the action against White Fox was “not uncharted territory”. “This is a pretty simple matter,” he said.
White Fox, owned by co-founders Georgia and Daniel Contos together with Daniel’s mother Melina Maceri, is mounting a defence with clear commercial logic at its core. Its barrister, Ed Heerey KC, told the court the label would argue the four stripes on its clothing are simply decorative rather than a trademark. He highlighted similar four-stripe items from other fast-fashion brands, including Princess Polly, Glassons and Shein, suggesting the design is far from unique to Adidas in the marketplace.
“Obviously Adidas has a reputation,” Heerey said. “Their own slogan is that it’s the brand with three stripes. Emphasis on the three.” The boutique will interrogate whether the four-stripe use is genuinely deceptively similar to the trademark and whether any consumers would actually be misled. Heerey also drew a distinction from the 2013 judgment, noting that Adidas’s earlier win rested on the common practice of placing branding on the side of shoes, a practice with no equivalent in clothing.
The case is being heard by Justice Ian Jackman, brother of the actor Hugh Jackman, who has set the dispute down for a hearing in early 2027. That timeline gives both companies a lengthy runway in a fight that could shape how far trademark protection extends in the fast-fashion sector, where imitation of signature design elements is prolific and margins depend on rapid product cycles.
For White Fox, the litigation marks the first high-profile action of its kind against a business that has grown into a major retail player since launching in Sydney in 2013. The co-founders built the brand on social media and influencer marketing, a strategy that later carried the online retailer into the US and UK markets and underpinned its $542m annual revenue. Any order to surrender profits on four-stripe products, or to abandon the design altogether, would land directly on a business whose growth model relies on trend-responsive apparel.
For Adidas, the case is part of a long-running global defence of its most valuable visual asset, pursued with varying success. The sportswear giant recently lost trademark infringement cases against luxury brand Thom Browne in the US, UK and Germany, a run of defeats that underscores the difficulty of enforcing stripe-based marks against well-resourced competitors. The Australian action, detailed in coverage at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/oct/09/adidas-white-fox-fashion-australia-trading-branding-sydney-ntwnfb, could prove a critical battleground for the company as it seeks to protect its brand equity in a market crowded with fast-fashion imitators.
The early 2027 hearing will determine whether White Fox’s stripes are decoration or infringement, and whether the boutique keeps or surrenders the profits at the centre of the dispute.