Published On: April 23rd 2026
Authored By: Fatema Bandukwala
AKK New Law Academy Pune
Abstract
When Italian luxury house Prada debuted footwear at Milan Fashion Week in June 2025 that bore a striking resemblance to India’s Geographical Indication-protected Kolhapuri chappal, the global backlash exposed a structural deficiency at the heart of the international intellectual property order. This article argues that the Prada–Kolhapuri episode is not merely a case of ethical failure by a luxury brand, but a symptom of a deeper legal gap: the territorial confinement of Geographical Indication protection under the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999, and the insufficiency of the TRIPS Agreement’s Article 22 framework to address design misappropriation by foreign actors. The article analyses the applicable domestic and international legal frameworks, diagnoses the gap between legal protection and practical enforceability, and proposes a multi-layered reform agenda encompassing extension of TRIPS Article 23 protections, bilateral GI mutual recognition, and a domestic Traditional Knowledge Digital Library model. The central contention is that GI law, as presently constituted, protects the name but not the knowledge — and that this distinction renders India’s artisan communities structurally vulnerable in a globalised fashion economy.
I. Introduction
On 22 June 2025, Prada presented its Spring/Summer 2026 menswear collection at Fondazione Prada in Milan. Seven of the fifty-six looks were styled with flat, open-toed, T-strap leather sandals indistinguishable in silhouette, construction, and braided design detail from the Kolhapuri chappal — a handcrafted leather sandal produced for over eight centuries by artisan communities, predominantly Dalit, across designated districts of Maharashtra and Karnataka.[1] The collection carried no attribution to the craft’s Indian origins.
The reputational fallout was swift. Social media comparisons went viral, the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (MACCIA) dispatched a formal letter of complaint to Prada’s board, a Public Interest Litigation was filed before the Bombay High Court,[2] and a reported ₹500 crore legal notice was served. Prada subsequently acknowledged the Indian inspiration in writing and dispatched a delegation to Kolhapur to engage with artisan communities; yet no collection piece was confirmed for commercial production.[3]
The episode raises a question that extends well beyond the facts of this controversy: does the existing legal architecture — domestic and international — provide adequate protection to GI-tagged traditional crafts against appropriation by foreign actors who replicate the design without invoking the name? This article argues that it does not, and that the Prada–Kolhapuri case illustrates precisely why the territorial limitation of GI law and the asymmetric structure of TRIPS must be urgently reformed.
II. The Kolhapuri Chappal and Its GI Protection: What the Law Provides
Kolhapuri chappals received a Geographical Indication tag under the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999[4] in 2019. The GI was jointly registered in favour of Sant Rohidas Leather Industries and Charmakar Development Corporation (LIDCOM) and Dr Babu Jagjivan Ram Leather Industries Development Corporation (LIDKAR), covering eight districts across Maharashtra and Karnataka.[5] The registration protects the use of the term ‘Kolhapuri’ for chappals produced within the designated geographical area, conferring a collective right on authorised users to invoke the mark and to take legal action against unauthorised use.
The Act prohibits several categories of infringement, including deceptive labelling suggesting a non-GI product originates from the protected region, use of imitation language (‘style of’, ‘kind of’, ‘imitation of’) alongside the GI, and acts of unfair competition or misleading association.[6] These protections are robust in their domestic ambit. The difficulty, as the Prada controversy starkly illustrated, is that they end at India’s borders.
Prada did not use the term ‘Kolhapuri’. It did not label its product as inspired by, derived from, or in the style of a Kolhapuri chappal — at least not until the backlash compelled a written acknowledgment. On a strict reading of the GI Act, therefore, no textual infringement occurred.[7] The question becomes whether the appropriation of the design identity of a GI-tagged product — its silhouette, braiding, T-strap construction, and toe-ring motif — used without its protected name, constitutes an infringement or a legally remediable wrong at all.
There is a credible, if untested, argument that it does. The GI Act’s prohibition on misleading associations and imitation language can be read to extend beyond mere textual misappropriation to encompass the misappropriation of a product’s distinctive visual identity, particularly where that identity is so singular as to function as an indication of origin in itself.[8] However, this remains an interpretive possibility rather than settled law, and the PIL filed before the Bombay High Court was ultimately dismissed, leaving the legal question unresolved.
III. The International Framework: TRIPS and Its Structural Asymmetry
At the international level, GI protection is governed by Section 3 (Articles 22–24) of the TRIPS Agreement. Article 22(1) defines a geographical indication as one which ‘identifies a good as originating in the territory of a Member, or a region or locality in that territory, where a given quality, reputation or other characteristic of the good is essentially attributable to its geographical origin.’[9] Article 22(2) obliges Member States to provide legal means to prevent use of any designation that misleads the public as to the geographical origin of goods or constitutes an act of unfair competition within the meaning of Article 10bis of the Paris Convention.[10]
The TRIPS framework thus operates on the principle of national treatment: India’s GI holders are entitled to the same protection in Italy that Italian GI holders would receive — but only to the extent that Italian law provides such protection, and only if the use in Italy is deceptive or constitutes unfair competition under Italian standards. Since Prada neither used the term ‘Kolhapuri’ nor sold a product under any GI-associated name, Italian authorities would have had no actionable basis under their domestic GI regime.
The structural inequity is compounded by the bifurcation within TRIPS itself. Article 23 provides a significantly higher level of protection for GIs applicable to wines and spirits: it prohibits their misuse even where no consumer deception occurs, even where the true origin is disclosed, and even where qualifying language such as ‘kind’ or ‘imitation’ is used.[11] This elevated standard was designed principally to protect European appellations like Champagne and Cognac. Handicraft GIs from developing countries — such as Kolhapuri chappals, Darjeeling tea, and Kanchipuram silk — are confined to the lower Article 22 standard, which requires proof of public misleading or unfair competition.[12]
Scholars have long noted this disparity. The Article 22/23 divide, as Lang observed, disproportionately burdens developing countries whose most valuable GIs are not wines or spirits but traditional agricultural products and artisanal handicrafts.[13] The Prada episode translates this doctrinal asymmetry into human consequences: a luxury brand can appropriate the centuries-old design vocabulary of a marginalised artisan community without incurring any legal liability under the international framework, precisely because that community’s GI is governed by the weaker tier of protection.
IV. The Design Appropriation Problem: Why GI Law Protects the Name, Not the Knowledge
The deeper conceptual difficulty exposed by this controversy is the fundamental character of GI protection itself. GI law protects a geographical signifier — it ensures that only goods from the designated region may use the protected name or indication. It does not protect the underlying traditional knowledge, the distinctive design vocabulary, or the accumulated craft techniques that give the product its identity. This is a considered choice: GI law is a consumer protection mechanism as much as a producer rights mechanism, oriented towards preventing origin deception rather than securing creative ownership.
This architecture creates a predictable vulnerability. A foreign actor who replicates the visual design of a GI-tagged product without using the protected name faces no GI-based liability. The Kolhapuri chappal’s distinctive features — its open-toed silhouette, braided leather T-strap, toe-ring loop, and vegetable-tanned hide — are in the public domain from the perspective of international IP law. They can be copied, commercialised at a hundred times the artisan price, and presented without attribution.[14]
This is not merely an ethical critique. It represents a failure of the IP framework to account for a distinct category of creative production: traditional crafts whose identity is inseparable from their design but whose design cannot be privately owned. Unlike patents or copyright, which protect new creation, and unlike trademarks, which protect commercial identifiers, GI law was intended to protect community-held reputational assets tied to geography. Where those assets are embodied in design rather than name, the protection is incomplete.
The economic consequences are material. Authentic Kolhapuri chappals are sold in Indian markets for as little as ₹100–1,200; the Prada runway design was reported at approximately ₹1.16 lakh.[15] The value differential between the original and its luxury appropriation captures, in stark terms, the economic displacement that occurs when traditional design knowledge is extracted from its community context and repackaged for global markets without benefit-sharing or attribution.
V. Towards Reform: A Multi-Layered Agenda
The Prada–Kolhapuri episode is not the first instance of this pattern — analogous controversies have arisen with Louis Vuitton and Bastar tribal art, Dior and Madhubani motifs, and Scandinavian fashion brands and the Indian dupatta.[16] The recurrence of such cases, and the consistent absence of legal remedy, demands structural reform at multiple levels.
First: At the international level, India should advocate more forcefully for the extension of TRIPS Article 23 protections to handicraft and artisanal GIs. The ongoing negotiations in the TRIPS Special Session have been deadlocked for over a decade, but the political salience of cases like Prada–Kolhapuri offers a renewed advocacy platform.
Second: India should pursue bilateral GI mutual recognition agreements with key fashion industry jurisdictions — Italy, France, and the United Kingdom — as part of its ongoing free trade agreement negotiations.[17] The EU-India FTA negotiations already contemplate a dedicated GI chapter; India should insist that it encompass design-based protection for traditional handicrafts, not merely name-based protection.
Third: India should expand the mandate and digital accessibility of its Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). Currently oriented primarily towards preventing biopiracy in the patent domain, the TKDL model should be extended to artisanal design traditions, creating a searchable, timestamped repository of traditional craft vocabularies that can serve as prior art evidence in foreign patent or design registration proceedings.
Fourth: Domestically, the GI Act should be amended to include a provision prohibiting the commercial appropriation of the distinctive design features of a registered GI product, independent of any use of the protected geographical name. This would bring Indian law into closer alignment with the moral intuition underlying GI protection: that the value embodied in a traditional craft is the community’s, and that its extraction without consent or benefit-sharing is a form of unjust enrichment — whether or not a protected term is invoked.
VI. Conclusion
The Prada–Kolhapuri controversy is legally instructive precisely because it reveals the limits of legal success. Prada issued an acknowledgment, dispatched emissaries to Kolhapur, and proposed a collaborative framework.[18] No court ordered it to do so. These outcomes were secured by reputational pressure and the arithmetic of social media, not by the operation of GI law. That outcome should offer no comfort to IP scholars or policymakers.
The central argument of this article is that the existing GI framework — domestic and international — protects the name but not the knowledge. It safeguards the geographical signifier while leaving the design vocabulary of traditional craft in the public domain, available for extraction by any actor with sufficient capital and platform to repackage it for global luxury markets. The Kolhapuri artisan community, predominantly Dalit, whose craft traditions span eight centuries, received neither legal remedy nor economic benefit from one of the world’s most recognisable luxury brands appropriating the design that defines their livelihood.
This outcome is not an accident of individual bad faith. It is a structural feature of an IP order designed, in its international dimensions, largely by and for the interests of developed economies. Reform requires India to pursue it simultaneously at four levels: in the WTO TRIPS negotiations, in bilateral trade agreements, through domestic legislative amendment, and through administrative expansion of the TKDL. The TRIPS Agreement itself identifies the promotion of social and economic welfare as an objective of IP protection.[19] A framework that allows the economic value of centuries-old artisanal knowledge to be extracted without remedy falls short of that objective — and the Kolhapuri chappal is its most visible recent proof.
References
[1] Al Jazeera, ‘Why is Prada Caught in a Sandal Scandal in India?’ (1 July 2025) <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/1>.
[2] Ganesh S. Hingmire, PIL filed before the Bombay High Court, 2 July 2025 (as reported in Khurana and Khurana IP Blog, August 2025).
[3] Fibre2Fashion, ‘The Prada–Kolhapuri Chappal Incident’ (25 July 2025) <https://www.fibre2fashion.com>.
[4] Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act 1999 (India), s 2(e).
[5] GI Registry, Application No. 269 (2019), joint registration for Maharashtra and Karnataka.
[6] Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act 1999, ss 22(1), 22(2).
[7] NovoJuris, ‘The Prada Paradox: GI and Infringement in the Kolhapuri Chappal Controversy’ (11 July 2025) <https://www.novojuris.com>.
[8] Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act 1999, s 22(1)(b): protection extends to imitations of a registered GI.
[9] Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), Annex 1C to the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the WTO (1994), art 22(1).
[10] Ibid, art 22(2).
[11] TRIPS Agreement, art 23(1). This higher tier prohibits use even where the true origin is disclosed or expressions such as ‘kind’, ‘type’, or ‘imitation’ are appended.
[12] WTO, ‘Background and Current Situation: Geographical Indications’ <https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/gi_background_e.htm>. The debate on extension of Article 23 protection to non-wine/spirit products has been deadlocked in the TRIPS Special Session since at least 2014.
[13] Aaron C. Lang, ‘On the Need to Expand Article 23 of the TRIPS Agreement’ (2006) 16 Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law 487, 499: ‘The disparity between Articles 22 and 23 disproportionately burdens developing countries.’
[14] The IP Press, ‘From Kolhapur to Milan: The Prada–Kolhapuri Controversy Through GI Lens’ (1 July 2025) <https://www.theippress.com>.
[15] Al Jazeera (n 1). Authentic Kolhapuri chappals retail between approximately ₹100–1,200 in local markets, compared to a reported price of approximately ₹1.16 lakh for the Prada runway design.
[16] The Luxury Closet, ‘Prada’s New Sandals: The Cultural Appropriation Scandal’ (9 July 2025) <https://theluxurycloset.com>. Comparable controversies include Louis Vuitton’s use of Bastar tribal art and Dior’s appropriation of Madhubani motifs.
[17] European Commission, ‘Geographical Indications in EU Trade Agreements’ (2023). The EU-India FTA negotiations, resumed in 2022, include a dedicated GI chapter but remain unresolved as of 2026.
[18] Fibre2Fashion (n 3). A joint working group was proposed, to include Lorenzo Bertelli (Prada CSR head), artisan representatives, and MACCIA officials.
[19] TRIPS Agreement, art 7: ‘The protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights should contribute to the promotion of technological innovation and to the transfer and dissemination of technology, to the mutual advantage of producers and users of technological knowledge and in a manner conducive to social and economic welfare.’
