In the fashion industry, history is treated as a public utility, and the quickest way to erase a culture is to change its price tag. The Western fashion apparatus doesn’t ever confess to an extraction; all it does is alter its vocabulary.
There’s a specific violence in the rename that goes well beyond the physical taking. The taking is old. Every culture has absorbed and been absorbed by others. This is the unremarkable historical truth that the fashion industry deploys most aggressively when it wants to avoid a more specific structural accountability. But the rename is the exact moment the origin is overwritten, transforming communal heritage into corporate intellectual property.
THE DUPATTA
The dupatta has existed for over a thousand years. It has draped across the shoulders of Mughal empresses, been woven in silk, georgette, and cotton. Carried in its folds the weight of modesty, ceremony, and everyday life across the Indian subcontinent. In 2025, a TikTok influencer wore one, and the comment section collectively decided it was giving Scandinavian summer scarf energy. The word dupatta was not mentioned once.
This isn’t mere ignorance. Or rather, it might be. But it’s also something far more insidious. It’s the particular fluency modern fashion has developed for mimicking heritage with enough aesthetic distance that the source becomes invisible.
THE PASHMINA
Consider the Kashmiri pashmina weavers, who have been working at their looms for over four centuries. Their technique is an inherited, painstaking, and irreplaceable métier, a proprietary technology of handcraft. A single shawl can take months, the fiber spun from the undercoat of a Himalayan mountain goat found at altitudes above 14,000 feet.
THE PAISLEY
The teardrop motif central to this shawl is called the badam (almond) in Kashmir. The West calls it paisley, after a textile town in Scotland that mass-produced machine-woven imitations for a 19th century European market that wanted the exotic aesthetic without the premium provenance. Then, Western retailers began labeling synthetic, mass-market wraps as pashminas. The word, once signifying an extraordinary, elite craft, was degraded into a generic descriptor for a $10 airport gift shop accessory. The West didn’t just borrow the shawl; it borrowed the name, devalued its intellectual property, and handed it back empty.
THE TABI
In 1989, Martin Margiela sent models down his debut runway in split-toed boots he’d designed after a trip to Japan. The tabi was a sock, then a boot, originating in 15th-century Japan. It had been worn by samurai, by nobility, by construction workers, by tea ceremony attendants. Its colors encoded social class; its shape was designed to promote balance through an architectural principle rooted in reflexology. It was required dress for Noh theatre and Kabuki performance. It was, in other words, a garment saturated with societal and historical meaning.
Today, through a process of historical erasure, the tabi is classified as a foundational Margiela signature; resold on luxury auction sites in archival colorways, and referenced in fashion criticism as definitive evidence of his deconstructive genius. Vetements took them; Balenciaga gestured at them; the entire creative lineage traces back, in the Western fashion imagination, not to historical Japan, but to a Belgian designer’s debut show.
THE QIPAO
We see the same reductive appetite applied to the qipao, which emerged in 1920s Shanghai as a profound symbol of modernity and women’s liberation, breaking away from the restrictive, multi-layered imperial dress of the Qing Dynasty. It was political; it was progressive. Yet, the Western retail market has systematically reduced this garment of sleek, modern autonomy into a hyper-sexualized caricature.
Brands from Reformation to fast-fashion giants regularly release pieces labeled as Mandarin-collar mini dresses or oriental mesh tops, treating the traditional high collar, asymmetrical pankou knots, and structured jacquard silks as shorthand for edgy festival-wear. When fashion houses feature it, it’s rarely a nod to Chinese modernism; it’s a superficial trope, an aesthetic detached from the history of the women who fought to wear it.
FASHION’S COLONIAL HABITS
The consistency of this extraction is the tell. Fashion borrows from everywhere, but it does not borrow from everywhere equally, and the differential maps precisely onto global power.
Isabel Marant executed the same maneuver with even sharper legal stakes. She lifted the Mixe community’s traditional huipil, the blouse of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec; a garment with specific communal, sacred, and ceremonial meaning, placed it directly onto her Étoile line, had it manufactured in India rather than Mexico, and retailed it for $365. The community had no international legal mechanism to protect their intellectual property or stop the extraction. The garment became “boho chic.” The Mixe women who had worn it their entire lives remained, in the fashion industry’s imagination, nameless inspiration boards.
WHO GETS A SEAT AT THE FASHION TABLE?
Japan possessed the economic and geopolitical weight to send its own avant-garde masters like Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo to the capital of Haute Couture to force a creative negotiation. The conversation that followed was not entirely equal, it was still largely legible as the West “discovering” Japan rather than Japan arriving, but it was at least a negotiation between recognized authors.
The communities that receive no such negotiation are, without exception, those without the structural power to demand one. The Mixe have no Yohji. The Kashmiri weavers whose badam became Scotland’s paisley did not open an atelier in Paris to reclaim their attribution. The Andean weavers whose traditional poncho became a Valentino resort-wear staple do not have a publicist. Many more examples of this exist.
The factor that determines who becomes a creative interlocutor and who becomes raw material is not aesthetic. It is structural. It is colonial. Luxury fashion continues to dine out on the aesthetics of the Global South, on the condition that the hosts remain in the kitchen. What the industry calls being inspired by the world means, with predictable regularity, being inspired by the parts of the world that have no mechanism to refuse.
