Romana Kryzanowska and the Trial That Freed the Word Pilates

In the summer of 2000, Romana Kryzanowska walked into a federal courtroom in the Southern District of New York not to teach, but to answer questions. She was seventy-six years old and, by a wide margin, the living person with the most direct relationship to Joseph Pilates: his student since age sixteen, his protégée for decades, the director he himself had appointed for the Eighth Avenue studio before his death in 1967. When the attorney asked what she did for a living, she answered plainly: I teach Pilates. Three routine words that, according to several accounts of the trial — we haven’t been able to check them against the primary court transcript, but they recur consistently across industry retellings — proved decisive in a judge’s ruling that the word belonged to no one.

Kryzanowska was born June 30, 1923, in Farmington, Michigan, the daughter of a Detroit artist. She was studying ballet at George Balanchine’s school when, at sixteen, an ankle injury sent her — on Balanchine’s own recommendation, since he trusted exercise before the scalpel — to the studio of a burly German who had named his method Contrology. The treatment worked. She stayed. In 1944 she married Pablo Mejía and spent more than a decade in Peru teaching and dancing; she returned to New York in 1958 and went back to the Eighth Avenue studio, where Joseph Pilates named her director before he died. She and Clara Pilates kept the business running until 1970, when it was formally renamed The Pilates Studio under Kryzanowska’s direction.

The trouble started with the name itself. In 1988, according to her biography, Kryzanowska herself filed a trademark registration for the word “Pilates.” Four years later, in 1992, a former client of the studio named Sean Gallagher acquired the rights to “Pilates Studio” and to the exercise instruction service mark, and began doing something no one had dared do before: demanding money. He sent cease-and-desist letters to teachers, studios and equipment manufacturers who used the word without paying him a license. Many, intimidated, closed or renamed themselves. One didn’t: Ken Endelman, owner of Current Concepts, Inc. — the manufacturer known today as Balanced Body — refused to pay or to stay quiet. In 1996, Gallagher sued him. The case would be called Pilates, Inc. v. Current Concepts, Inc.

The trial reached Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum’s courtroom in June 2000, after four years of litigation. Kryzanowska, who at some point in the nineties had maintained a business relationship with Gallagher’s organization — a relationship she would later end, going on to found her own certification program with her daughter Sari and her granddaughter Daria — took the stand. She wasn’t anyone’s star witness. She was, simply, the living person with the most authority to say what “Pilates” was and wasn’t. And what she said under oath was exactly what any of her students would have heard her say in an elevator: that she taught Pilates, plainly, the way someone says they teach yoga or give piano lessons.

On October 19, 2000, in a ninety-three-page opinion, Judge Cedarbaum ruled that the registered “Pilates” trademarks were invalid and ordered the Patent and Trademark Office to cancel them immediately. The reasoning had several fronts: if a legitimate mark on the equipment had ever existed, it had been abandoned long before Gallagher registered it — and his registration, moreover, had been obtained through false representations to the trademark office itself; the mark on instruction services had been assigned invalidly, without the business and goodwill that trademark law requires to accompany any assignment. But the core of the ruling was simpler and more forceful: “Pilates,” by that point, was a generic term. It named a method, not a company. And a generic term cannot be monopolized, no matter who says otherwise from a witness stand.

The ruling freed the word for everyone. Since 2000, no teacher, studio or manufacturer needs a license to call what they teach or sell “Pilates” — a legal condition that, without meaning to, laid the groundwork for the growth that today drives nearly twelve million practitioners in the United States alone. Kryzanowska, for her part, didn’t leave the courtroom owning the word — she left with something else: the authority to keep training teachers under her own name, which was, in the end, the only thing that was ever really at stake. She died in New York on August 30, 2013, at ninety. The line she spoke under oath remains, today, literally true for anyone who wants to say it.