When Prada sent braided leather sandals down a Milan runway last year, its show notes called them simple “leather footwear.” In India, the design has a name: the Kolhapuri chappal, a sandal made by hand in Maharashtra for roughly 800 years. The craft has been associated with Dalit artisan communities and has been protected by a Geographical Indication since 2019. In any Indian bazaar, a pair costs about $12. Prada’s cost around $1,200.
Prada only acknowledged the sandal’s Indian roots after a public outcry, but they are not the only luxury fashion brand to “borrow” Indian designs. This September, Fendi’s multicolor Baguette, covered in mirrors and beads and priced at $10,000, sparked debate over whether Gujarati and Rajasthani mirror-work had been repackaged as luxury. Days earlier, Ralph Lauren posted a deep-pink gown, whose embroidery critics compared to zardozi. Ralph Lauren had already been criticized this year for jhumka-style earrings, billed as “vintage accessories,” and a $375 skirt, “inspired by” bandhani, with no mention of India.
It would be easy to tell this as a story of theft, but the facts don’t quite allow it. Artisans at Mumbai’s Chanakya School of Craft made Fendi’s Baguette, and Fendi credited them in a documentary video. Ralph Lauren has never called its gown zardozi, and no court has found infringement by either brand. The facts may matter less than one would like, but “somebody was credited somewhere” is a low bar. The more telling detail is the tag. “Vintage accessories” is all most customers will ever read, and it teaches them to see a style, not the place or the people who created it.
The vocabulary of erasure
“Bohemian” may be the most successful erasure in Western fashion. Boho-chic owes much of its identity to Indian dress, yet the tunics, wrap skirts, and jewelry are rarely called Indian-inspired. This summer, sequins, beading, and heavy embroidery went viral as “Ibiza fashion,” a label that detached the look from the saris and lehengas it resembled.
The geography matters. Ibiza’s hippie scene was itself a stop on a route that ran from San Francisco to India, and Western travelers funded those trips by selling textiles back home. This makes the “Ibiza aesthetic” a copy of a copy, with the original source scrubbed off. The same logic gave us the “Scandinavian scarf” and a Nordstrom jhola bag rebranded as an “Indian Souvenir Bag,” which rebranded the original’s everyday grocery-run origins into exotic charm. Renaming a craft erases where it came from, and without a name that points back to India, the artisans have nothing to claim. Shoppers can’t ask for what they don’t know exists, and protections like Geographical Indication status only help when the origin is named.
An old story
This exploitative relationship is not a new one. By one estimate, India produced about a quarter of the world’s industrial output in 1750, much of it cloth. By 1900, that share had fallen to roughly 2 percent, and by the mid-nineteenth century India had lost its textile export market and much of its home market. Historians who describe this period point to British tax and land policies that served British commercial goals at the expense of Indian people. The raw skill was Indian, and the profits went elsewhere. The same economists estimate a large net transfer of wealth from India to Britain before 1815.
Historians still disagree about how much of this was policy and how much was market. The same working paper weighs local factors, such as the collapse of Mughal rule, against the cost advantages of European factories. Revisionists go a step further. The economic historian Tirthankar Roy argues in The Crafts and Capitalism that skill-intensive handmade textiles survived machine competition on a large scale. The fate of the handloom weaver remains central to the argument over what British rule did to the Indian economy. But the survival argument does not weaken the point here. It sharpens it. If the skill endured, the question is not whether India lost its craft but who has been paid for it.
Indian nationalists understood cloth as a political question long before Western fashion houses did. In the twentieth century they treated this period of deindustrialization as the beginning of their own conquest. They burned British factory-made clothing in the streets, and the Indian National Congress put a spinning wheel on its first flag in 1931. Today the skill is still Indian, and the profit is still made elsewhere.
The savior’s footnote
The usual corporate answer to a scandal is generosity. After the Kolhapuri backlash, Prada launched a limited-edition “Made in India” line and a fully funded training program for 180 artisans, with top participants invited to study at its academy in Italy. Fendi is bringing Chanakya artisans to a Harrods pop-up to demonstrate their techniques. Some of this is real, and some artisans welcomed the attention. One Kolhapur seller said the controversy helped him sell five times his usual volume.
However, these gestures tell a story. A European house takes a craft, is caught, and returns as the benefactor who will teach the artisans to “meet evolving market needs.” The craft is cast as a raw resource, and the brand as the civilizing hand. Artisans whose families have worked this leather for generations don’t need to be taught their trade in Italy. They need to be named, paid in proportion to the markup, and given a share of the story.
What credit actually means
As Biocon’s Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw put it about the Fendi bag, Indian craftsmanship deserves recognition, not imitation. Real credit would mean putting “India,” the craft’s name and the workshop in the product description, not in a footnote on social media. It would mean naming artisans and sharing revenue, not retreating to “boho” or “Ibiza” when the craft already has a perfectly good name.
The artisans aren’t asking luxury to stop admiring them. They are asking it to say where it learned the word for beauty.
