Vogue sues Dogue, alleging a copycat

A recent cover of Dogue, a canine fashion magazine, featured an Italian greyhound wearing an evening gown, an opera glove on each paw. Several pages in, a nattily dressed labradoodle showed off a collection of trench coats.

Readers find this sort of thing charming. The media company Condé Nast does not.

In December, Condé Nast filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that Dogue had infringed on its trademark for Vogue, the human-centric fashion magazine published since 1892.

Lawyers for the company wrote in their complaint that Dogue’s logo was “obviously intended” to confuse customers by suggesting a relationship between the magazines. The continued publication of Dogue was a blow to Vogue’s reputation, they added, and was “likely to damage Condé Nast irreparably.”

Now, the typically harmonious world of dog fashion is gearing up for a legal showdown that Olga Portnaya, the creator and editor-in-chief of Dogue, believes is about far more than who gets to photograph a vizsla in a turtleneck.

“Art and culture have always evolved through reinterpretation and dialogue,” Portnaya, a graphic designer and photographer who started Dogue in 2019, said in an interview. “For me, this is a larger fight: I’m not just fighting for my own work and our community, but for other independent creators.”

She said she was astonished that Condé Nast was so interested in confronting her magazine, a one-woman editorial operation that sells fewer than 100 copies per issue. The complaint demands that Portnaya pay Condé Nast unspecified damages and deliver all copies of Dogue to the company “for destruction.”

A representative for Condé Nast said in an email that the company had made several efforts to resolve the dispute with Portnaya before going to court. The representative added that Portnaya’s publication used Vogue images without permission, and that Condé Nast takes intellectual property violations seriously.

Dogue began as part of a series of faux magazine covers that Portnaya, 41, who lives in Los Angeles, posted on Instagram under the handle Coverdogs. (Other installments included Spawrts Illustrated and Vanity Fur.)

She released the first print issue of Dogue in 2021 with a splashy cover featuring her Pomeranian, Mimi Bear. She said the magazine’s name was an homage to the breed of mastiff she owned growing up, the Dogue de Bordeaux, as well as a “playful nod to Vogue, which makes our dog-fashion focus immediately clear.”

The magazine is offered free online and sold at a single newsstand in Beverly Hills, California. Each issue features a four-legged cover star beneath serif text that reads “Dogue,” placed roughly where the Vogue mark appears on Condé Nast’s magazine. Between spreads of canine couture, readers might encounter an interview with actor Kevin Costner about his English Labrador, Bobby, who enjoys eating carrots. (Portnaya writes most of the magazine’s articles under the byline Oli Port.)

The two magazines coexisted without incident until 2024, when Condé Nast displayed a fresh enthusiasm for four-legged models.

That August, Vogue’s website published a digital issue featuring celebrity dogs, including Pilaf, a petite Chihuahua who belongs to actress Demi Moore. It was accompanied by a cover-style image with the title “Dogue” and an introduction written by Chloe Malle, now the head of editorial content at American Vogue.

“Dogs have always had a place in the pages of Vogue,” Malle wrote, adding that the project had been inspired by a February 1897 Vogue cover featuring a Labrador puppy. Condé Nast brought back its version of Dogue the next summer with a cover contest for readers’ pets that received 56,000 submissions and featured stories on dogs belonging to Sabrina Carpenter and Lewis Hamilton.

In October 2025, Condé Nast sent Portnaya a cease-and-desist letter instructing her to rebrand her magazine. The company also opposed Dogue’s trademark application, which Portnaya filed in 2022 and is still underway.

Trademark cases generally come down to whether a customer is likely to be confused about a product’s source or sponsorship. Will customers think that Portnaya’s Dogue is in some way endorsed by Vogue? “That’s the big-ticket question,” said Jennifer E. Rothman, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

She pointed to a trademark dispute between Jack Daniel’s and the maker of a chew toy shaped like a whiskey bottle, the Bad Spaniels Silly Squeaker. In 2023, the Supreme Court said that the dog toy manufacturer was not protected by the First Amendment.

“This case is about dog toys and whiskey, two items seldom appearing in the same sentence,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the court’s opinion. (A lower court later ruled that the toy was unlikely to confuse consumers, but that its maker had unlawfully tarnished the Jack Daniel’s brand by associating it with canine excrement.)

In 2007, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a trademark infringement claim against the company behind “Chewy Vuiton” dog toys, which resembled miniature Louis Vuitton handbags.

“There’s lots of these dog cases, in part because people like to make puns and parodies around dogs and dog toys,” Rothman said. Based on an initial review of the Dogue dispute, she said she did not think it was a slam-dunk for either party. “It could be litigated for some time – and that makes it expensive.”

That may pose a challenge for Portnaya. In February, she started a crowdfunding drive to help cover her legal expenses that has raised $6,000.

She is being represented by David A. Makman, a patent and intellectual property lawyer who wrote in an email that he was “disappointed” in Condé Nast.

“My client’s magazine is a parody that features humorous pictures of dogs, while Vogue is a fashion magazine that features serious photographs of human models,” he wrote, adding, “I don’t think anyone would have difficulty recognizing the difference.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.