1 hour ago
1
As a sidebar to the civil war in the House of Beckham, it emerged at the weekend that Victoria has trademarked all her children’s names. A lot of people think this is a peculiar parenting move, and a lot of other people think this a perfectly natural thing to do, for someone who has built a global brand from just their name and raw talent – but I thought, wait a second: my daughter is also called Harper and my dog is called Romeo, and even though neither of them has imminent plans to launch a perfume, I still should have been consulted on this.
My Harper was born two years before the Beckhams’, and therefore by any reasonable metric, Posh copied me. But – see brand-building, above – by the time my Harper was four, even her own father couldn’t remember which one had come first. No such excuse for Romeo the dog, who started out 14 years younger than Romeo BeckhamTM, but is now 46 years older, thanks to dog years. The name clash couldn’t be helped: he came from a themed litter (featuring Rogue, Rebel, Ricky, Ross and Raoul) and he was the most loving. You can’t mess with that kind of nominative determinism.
The law is pretty clear that, once you become an adult, your parent can no longer own your name or any domain thereto associated, although the law can say what it likes; I still think of my kids’ fingernails as basically mine.
Anyway, it turns out that the keyword in all this legal apparatus is “Beckham”, so any Harpers, Romeos or, for that matter, Brooklyns who want to continue calling themselves that can go right ahead, including the New York borough, the beer and the sad novel.
It would have been good if Victoria had also trademarked “Posh” and all traits of poshness, including but not limited to having a Rolls-Royce but no central heating, using an outdoor voice when you’re indoors, and having an ineradicable yet formless and fragile sense of superiority. She could have excised those traits from society by simply asking everyone to apply to her before they used them. At least, I think that’s how trademarking works.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
-
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
