Borrowed Without Credit: Cultural Appropriation, Collaboration, and the Question of Recognition in Fashion

Walk down any high street today and the evidence is everywhere: head wraps modeled after the South Asian dupatta sold as “the new It-accessory,” embroidery patterns lifted from indigenous Mexican textiles, and turbans styled as runway props.

Each of these items carries centuries of meaning in the culture it comes from. In many of these cases, the brand selling the item never mentions where the design originated, and the community that has worn, made, and protected that design for generations sees no credit and no share of the profit.

This is the paradox at the centre of contemporary fashion. The industry has, at the same time, built an entire commercial genre the brand collaboration, or “collab” around the idea that credit matters. When Louis Vuitton works with Supreme, or adidas works with the designer Grace Wales Bonner, both names appear on the label, both parties are paid, and the partnership is marketed as the point of the product. Fashion clearly knows how to credit a creative source when that source has a lawyer, a marketing team, or a recognisable brand name behind it. The question this report asks is why that same courtesy is so rarely extended to the communities often indigenous, often from the Global South whose textiles, silhouettes, and sacred garments are borrowed just as directly, but without a byline.

Fashion law scholar Susan Scafidi, founder of Fordham University's Fashion Law Institute, defines cultural appropriation as taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expression, or artefacts from someone else's culture without permission (Anokhi Life, 2016).

Scafidi is careful to note that cultural exchange itself is not the problem exchange between cultures, she argues, can be rich and rewarding and should be encouraged. What turns exchange into appropriation is the absence of permission, credit, or compensation, particularly when “the source community is a minority group that has been oppressed or exploited in other ways” (Anokhi Life, 2016).

This distinction maps neatly onto the difference between “collab culture” and uncredited borrowing. A true collaboration is negotiated: both parties agree to the partnership, both are named, and both benefit financially. Uncredited borrowing skips every one of those steps. The design is lifted, restyled, sold at a markup that the originating community will never see, and unless a journalist, a lawyer, or a viral social media post intervenes the source is never named at all.

In 2015, French designer Isabel Marant released a blouse in her Etoile spring/summer collection that was, according to the Mixe community of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec in Oaxaca, Mexico, virtually identical to a blouse design their community has hand-embroidered for roughly 600 years (Hendriksz, 2015). The Mixe women held a press conference accusing Marant of “hijacking a cultural heritage for commercial benefit,” and the mayor of Tlahuitoltepec noted that the design “has transcended borders” but “is not a novel creation” as Marant had implied (Hendriksz, 2015). The story took an even stranger turn when another fashion company, Antik Batik, separately tried to claim copyright ownership over the same design meaning two French and European companies were, briefly, fighting each other in court over a pattern that belonged to neither of them. A French court ultimately ruled that the design originated with the Mixe community and that neither Antik Batik nor Isabel Marant held any property rights to it (Jezebel, 2015).

Notably, the ruling did not result in any compensation flowing back to the Mixe community itself the case simply established who did not own the design, not who did.

This case illustrates a structural problem: even when a source community successfully proves that a design was theirs first, existing law is often not built to return credit or profit to a community rather than an individual or corporate owner.

The Mixe women were vindicated in public opinion, but the commercial mechanisms of fashion built for individual designers and registered brands had no ready mechanism to credit or pay a centuries-old artisan tradition.

In February 2018, Gucci sent models down its Milan Fashion Week runway wearing an item it called the “Indy Full Turban,” styled as an accessory alongside other looks (Hunt, 2018). For the Sikh community, the turban or dastaar is not an accessory at all; it is one of the most sacred articles of faith in the religion, tied fold-by-fold as a daily act of devotion. When the $790 turban resurfaced for sale on Nordstrom's website the following year, the backlash was immediate. The Sikh Coalition stated that “the turban is not just a fashion accessory to monetize, but a religious article of faith that millions of Sikhs around the world view as sacred” (Yam, 2019). Sikh activist Harjinder Singh Kukreja wrote directly to Gucci: “Your models have used Turbans as ‘hats’ whereas practising Sikhs tie them neatly fold-by-fold” (Yam, 2019). Nordstrom eventually apologised and pulled the item; Gucci itself never issued a comparable public apology to the Sikh community (Fox News, 2019).

What makes this case especially instructive is that it was not Gucci's first appropriation controversy from the same creative period the same Fall 2018 collection also drew criticism for styles read as evoking hijab and niqab without acknowledgement, and the brand's prior Cruise collection had been accused of lifting silhouettes from Harlem designer Dapper Dan (Hunt, 2018).

A pattern like this suggests appropriation is often not a single oversight but a recurring creative habit one that a genuine collaboration model, with a named partner and a negotiated agreement, would have prevented from the start.

As a designer, the pattern above is one I recognise well beyond these two headline cases. The head scarf worn for generations across South Asia, including the dupatta tradition in India, as an item of modesty, ceremony, and identity has, in the last several years, been repackaged by Western fashion media and retail as a fresh, trending accessory. It appears on runways and in styling editorials described in the language of novelty: a “new must-have,” a “statement piece,” a “on-trend layering tool.” What is almost never present in that coverage is the word India, the word dupatta, or any acknowledgement that the styling being celebrated as new has been practised, without interruption, by South Asian communities for centuries.

This is the same mechanism visible in the Mixe blouse and the Gucci turban cases, just quieter and less legally contested. There is no single designer to name in a lawsuit and no single company that can be pinned down in a press cycle, because the borrowing happens diffusely across dozens of brands, influencers, and trend reports rather than in one dramatic runway moment. That diffusion is, in a sense, the mechanism's protection: it is much harder to hold “trend culture” accountable than it is to hold one designer accountable.

My argument is that this makes credit more important, not less. If a brand cannot name a single collaborator to share the profit with, the least it can do is name the culture the design comes from in its marketing copy the same way a collab drop always names both parties on the box.

Fashion already has a working model for giving credit it is called a collaboration. When adidas partners with British-Jamaican designer Grace Wales Bonner, the resulting sneaker carries both names, both design perspectives are acknowledged in the campaign, and Wales Bonner is compensated for her creative direction.

Nobody has to sue anybody for that credit to happen it is built into the deal from the beginning.

The industry could apply the same logic to cultural sourcing more broadly, and a handful of practical shifts would move the needle:

1. Name the source culture in marketing and product copy the same way a collaborator's name appears on a co-branded product.

2. Involve artisans or cultural consultants from the source community during the design process, not after a controversy forces a response.

3. Share commercial upside licensing fees, royalties, or direct commissioning of artisans rather than treating a source community's tradition as free raw material.

4. Distinguish, in design education and studio practice, between garments that hold religious or sacred meaning (like the dastaar) and garments that are primarily aesthetic, since the former carry a higher duty of care regardless of how “on-trend” they become.

None of this requires fashion to stop drawing on global textile traditions as Scafidi herself argues, cultural exchange is valuable and should continue.

It requires only that the industry extend to source communities the same basic courtesy it already extends to its collaborators: a name on the label and a share of the reward.

Fashion's collab culture proves that the industry is fully capable of crediting where a design idea came from it does so proudly, in bold type, whenever the collaborator is a brand with legal standing. The Isabel Marant and Gucci controversies, and the quieter, ongoing repackaging of the South Asian head scarf as a Western trend, show what happens when the source has no legal team behind it: the same act of borrowing that would be marketed as a celebrated partnership becomes, instead, an unattributed appropriation. The difference between the two is not the borrowing itself; cultures have always exchanged ideas, and fashion has always been a place where that exchange plays out on the body. The difference is whether credit and compensation follow the idea back to its source. As a designer, I see this as the real measure of a collection's integrity: not whether it draws inspiration from another culture, but whether it is honest enough to say so. Until crediting a centuries-old textile tradition is treated with the same seriousness as crediting a co-branding partner, fashion will keep profiting from cultures it refuses to name and no amount of runway spectacle will make that borrowing anything other than what it is.