Top fashion magazine’s battle with pub that’s in...
THE Star Inn at Vogue has stood in the tiny Cornish hamlet near Redruth for more than 200 years.
So when a letter arrived from the glossy fashion magazine of the same name ordering pub landlord Mark Graham to stop using it, he naturally assumed one of his regulars was playing a practical joke.
But while the magazine has since backtracked, Mr Graham, 60, was astonished to find that the letter threatening he and wife Rachel, 49, to ‘cease and desist’ using the name was real. ‘I thought some bugger in the village was having me on,’ Mr Graham said.
‘Someone couldn’t be bothered to go on to Google and see that Vogue is a Cornish hamlet that’s been here for hundreds of years.’
Vogue’s owners, Conde Nast, claimed its readers could be confused and unable to differentiate between the magazine and the pub, which few outside Cornwall have ever heard of.
In a letter, dated March 1 this year, chief operating officer Sabine Vandenbroucke wrote: ‘We are concerned that the name you are using is going to cause problems because as far as the general public is concerned a connection between your business and ours is likely to be inferred.’
At the end it added menacingly: ‘Please reply within seven days or we will take remedial action.’
Luckily, the Truro-born publican saw the funny side and decided to reply, including images of the pub and local street signs bearing the Vogue village name.
In his letter Mr Graham joked that it was the magazine that should have sought permission to use the name of the village – which existed before the publication – not the other way around. ‘In answer to your question whether we would change our name, it is a categorical NO,’ he wrote.
In an embarrassing U-turn, Conde Nast last night sent a letter to the Grahams saying they were ‘quite correct to note that further research would have identified we did not need to send such a letter on this occasion’. Conde Nast was contacted for comment.