BETWEEN HERITAGE AND HIGH FASHION : THE LEGAL VACUUM IN PROTECTING TRADITIONAL CRAFTS

Abstract

In June 2025 and early 2026, the global luxury fashion industry sparked a profound legal controversy when Dior, Prada, and Ralph Lauren appropriated traditional Indian crafts, including Mukaish embroidery, Kolhapuri chappals, and Jhumkas, without credit or compensation to the artisan communities that created them. This article examines the structural failures of existing intellectual property frameworks, specifically copyright, trademark, patents, and geographical indications (GIs), in protecting Traditional Cultural Expressions (TCEs). Through an analysis of three landmark controversies and the judicial response in Prof. Adv. Ganesh S. Hingmire v. Prada Group (2025), it argues for a sui generis legal framework that mandates cultural disclosure, ensures benefit-sharing, and grants artisan communities direct locus standi to protect their heritage.

I. Introduction

In June 2025, the runways of Paris and Milan became the centre of a profound legal and ethical storm. French luxury house Dior unveiled a coat priced at approximately $200,000 (Rs. 1.73 crore), featuring intricate, shimmering dots of Mukaish embroidery. While the garment was celebrated as a pinnacle of savoir-faire, the twelve artisans who spent thirty-four days hand-twisting metal wires into fabric remained legally invisible, uncredited and uncompensated beyond a meagre daily wage. This was closely followed by Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 menswear collection, which showcased leather sandals unmistakably derived from the 12th century Kolhapuri chappal, and Ralph Lauren’s 2026 vintage accessories line, which rebranded traditional Indian Jhumkas as a generic aesthetic relic.

These incidents are not merely fashion faux pas; they are symptoms of a systematic legal vacuum in the global intellectual property regime. While modern high fashion increasingly relies on the cultural capital of the Global South to justify luxury price points, the law remains trapped in an individualistic, western-centric framework. Standard IP protections, namely copyright, trademark, and patents, are fundamentally designed to reward novelty and identifiable authorship, concepts that are fundamentally incompatible with Traditional Cultural Expressions (TCEs), which are by nature collective, intergenerational, and evolving.

Even Geographical Indications (GIs), often hailed as the guardians of heritage, have proven to be a paper tiger in the face of global appropriation. As seen in the PIL filed in the Bombay High Court in Ganesh S. Hingmire v. Prada Group (2025), the law protects the name of the craft but struggles to protect its aesthetic essence. When a global brand replicates a traditional motif but strips it of its name and cultural context, it exploits a loophole that leaves local artisans with no standing for infringement.

This article examines the widening chasm between heritage and high fashion. By analysing the failures of the current IP statutes in the wake of the Dior, Prada, and Ralph Lauren controversies, it argues for the urgent necessity of a sui generis legal framework, one that recognizes collective ownership and mandates benefit-sharing, ensuring that the hands that create the world’s most expensive crafts are no longer rendered invisible by law.

II. Problem Statement: The High Fashion Borrowing Loophole

The legal vacuum in protecting Traditional Cultural Expressions is best understood through the lens of recent controversies where global luxury fashion houses have monetized heritage designs without formal credit or community compensation. These incidents highlight what may be termed the biopiracy of design, where cultural capital is extracted from the Global South to fuel the fashion narratives of the North.

1. Dior and the Moral Right to Paternity (2025)
In June 2025, Dior’s debut collection by its new creative director featured a coat priced at $200,000, showcasing the intricate “Fardi ka Kaam” of the Mukaish embroidery tradition.[1] While the labour was reportedly outsourced to twelve artisans in Lucknow, the brand’s marketing failed to mention the geographical or cultural origin of the craft.

From a legal standpoint, this case underscores the failure of moral rights. Under the Indian copyright framework, the right to paternity entitles the creator to be identified with their work.[2] However, because Mukaish is a centuries-old craft, the law struggles to identify a single author to whom this right belongs. Consequently, luxury brands can purchase physical labour (economic rights) while entirely bypassing the spiritual and legal recognition of the community (moral rights).

2. Prada and the Locus Standi Crisis (2025)
The most significant legal battle emerged in July 2025, when Prada’s toe-ring sandals, virtually identical to the 12th century Kolhapuri chappal,[3] were priced at Rs. 1.2 lakh. A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) was filed in the Bombay High Court alleging cultural misappropriation and violation of the Geographical Indication (GI) Act.[4] The High Court dismissed the plea in Prof. Adv. Ganesh S. Hingmire v. Prada Group,[5] raising a critical barrier: locus standi. The Court ruled that the petitioners, a group of advocates, were not the aggrieved persons or the registered proprietors of the GI. In India, the registered proprietor of the Kolhapuri GI is a state-run corporation.[6] This creates a statutory lacuna: if a government body chooses not to litigate against a global brand, the actual artisan communities are left without a legal voice, since the current law restricts the right to sue to the registered entity rather than the custodians themselves.

3. Ralph Lauren and the “Vintage” Misattribution (2026)
In March 2026, Ralph Lauren faced criticism for featuring bell-shaped earrings closely resembling the South Asian Jhumka in its official advertisements, describing them simply as “vintage accessories.”[7] More significantly, the brand attributed the earrings to its “Authentic Makers” programme, a platform associated with Native American designers, thereby conflating two entirely distinct cultural traditions. This misattribution compounded the harm: not only were the South Asian origins erased, but the design was falsely grafted onto an unrelated indigenous identity.

This incident illustrates the challenge of addressing commercial misrepresentation under existing law. By labelling Jhumkas as “vintage” rather than using their cultural name, the brand effectively stripped the earrings of their traceable heritage and positioned them as belonging to the public domain, thereby placing them beyond the reach of protections designed to preserve cultural specificity.

4. Digital Rebranding as Cultural Appropriation
The above cases reflect a broader pattern of what may be termed “semantic theft,” where traditional garments are stripped of their names to bypass legal protections. This operates through two primary tactics:

i. Erasure via Rebranding: By marketing items such as the South Asian dupatta as a “Scandinavian scarf,”[8] brands move cultural heritage into a fictionalised public domain. This makes the product untraceable to its roots and immune to “passing off” legal claims.

ii. The GI Loophole: Fast fashion labels use generic descriptors like “Boho-Tunic” for kurtas to circumvent the Geographical Indications Act, which protects names rather than silhouettes.[9] This allows brands to profit from ethnic aesthetics while avoiding any legal obligation to credit or compensate source communities.

As a result, digital rebranding dilutes the distinctiveness of heritage crafts, making it increasingly difficult for original creators to assert their designs as “prior art” in international law.

III. The Inadequacy of the Existing Intellectual Property Regime

The structural failure of modern IP law lies in its adherence to 19th-century hierarchical attitudes toward local knowledge.[10] As high fashion houses monetize heritage, they exploit a legal framework built on western notions of “innovation” that systematically excludes traditional systems of creation.

1. The Individualistic Bias and the “Author” Problem
Existing frameworks, including the Copyright Act, 1957, require a fixed “author” and demonstrable “originality.” However, Traditional Cultural Expressions are often the result of collective, intergenerational evolution. As noted by Christoph Antons,[11] TCEs are constantly evolving and are held by communities rather than individuals. Because they are passed down through intergenerational transmission, they fail the novelty test of patent law and the originality test of copyright law, rendering them legally invisible.

2. The “Public Domain” as a Tool of Extraction
Perhaps the most damaging legal concept is the “public domain.” In western IP theory, heritage is viewed as a natural resource available for unrestricted use. Olufunmilayo Arewa argues that this discourse reflects historical hierarchies of culture and power, where the Global North extracts inspiration from the Global South without compensation.[12] This creates a parasitic relationship in which luxury brands invoke the public domain defence to engage in what can be termed design biopiracy: the commercial plunder of traditional knowledge under the guise of cultural borrowing.

IV. The Path Forward: A Sui Generis Framework

To bridge this legal vacuum, the law must move beyond top-down international treaties and embrace a sui generis framework that recognises the unique nature of Traditional Cultural Expressions.

1. Extending Mandatory Disclosure to Fashion
A significant milestone was reached with the 2024 WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge.[13] While this treaty currently focuses on patent disclosures, its underlying logic must be extended to the fashion industry. A mandatory disclosure requirement would compel luxury houses to declare the geographical and cultural origin of any inspired motif, effectively codifying the right to paternity for artisan communities.

2. The Nagoya Protocol and Benefit-Sharing
Drawing from the Nagoya Protocol in environmental law,[14] the fashion industry requires a robust access and benefit-sharing system. As suggested by Arewa,[15] law must foster bottom-up approaches that recognise the value of local knowledge. Under this model, the use of a traditional motif such as the Mukaish dot would require a material transfer agreement, and a percentage of commercial sales would be directed into an artisan community fund, ensuring that the economic surplus generated by luxury fashion supports the preservation of its craft source.

3. Reforming the Indian GI Act: Protecting Visual Identity
Domestically, the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999 requires urgent reform to include visual identity protection. The current law is a paper tiger because it protects the name but ignores the aesthetic soul of the craft. By implementing an ontology-based framework, as proposed by Mallik, Chaudhury, and Dinesh,[16] it is possible to interlink digital heritage with its background knowledge and living context. This would allow for the creation of local innovation zones where the visual essence of a craft is formally registered, providing communities with the locus standi to challenge aesthetic piracy even when a brand avoids using a protected name.

V. Conclusion

The recent controversies involving Dior’s Mukaish coat, Prada’s toe-ring sandals, and Ralph Lauren’s Jhumkas are not isolated instances of fashion copying. They expose a fundamental crisis in global intellectual property architecture: a legal system rooted in 19th-century, individualistic notions of authorship that was never designed to protect the collective genius of traditional artisans.

Copyright law has failed to recognise the rights of Lucknowi embroiderers. The GI regime that was meant to protect the Kolhapuri chappal proved incapable of confronting aesthetic piracy. These failures demand a framework that goes beyond protecting names, one that mandates cultural disclosure, enables benefit-sharing with source communities, and restores locus standi to the artisans themselves.

Ultimately, for the legal system to achieve equity, it must shift its conceptual orientation from passive tolerance of appropriation to active restoration of attribution. Through a combination of technology-enabled digital attribution, reformed GI legislation, and a sui generis TCE protection regime, fashion and heritage can coexist in a relationship governed by law rather than exploitation. Only when the law recognises the rights of artisans will the world’s most celebrated crafts be truly protected.

References

[1] After Prada Kolhapuri Drama, Dior Faces Backlash Over Rs. 1.67 Crore Coat, Times of India (2025), available at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/122234600.cms
[2] Section 57, The Copyright Act, 1957 (Act No. 14 of 1957).
[3] Prada Accused of Cashing In on Indian Culture with Kolhapuri-Inspired Sandals, The Guardian (June 30, 2025), available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/30/prada-accused-of-cashing-in-on-indian-culture-with-kolhapuri-inspired-sandals
[4] The Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999 (Act No. 48 of 1999).
[5] Prof. Adv. Ganesh S. Hingmire v. Prada Group, Bombay High Court (July 16, 2025), available at: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/123371037/
[6] Sant Rohidas Leather Industries and Charmakar Development Corporation Limited (LIDCOM) is the registered proprietor of the Kolhapuri GI.
[7] Sagarika Choudhary, Ralph Lauren’s “Vintage” Earrings Are Indian Jhumkas, and Remain Uncredited, Harper’s Bazaar India (March 23, 2026), available at: https://www.harpersbazaar.in/fashion/story/ralph-laurens-vintage-earrings-are-indian-jhumkas-and-remain-uncredited-1363845-2026-03-23
[8] Aryaveer Sharma, When Did Dupatta Become European?, The Geostrata (July 24, 2025), available at: hegeostrata.com/post/when-did-dupatta-become-european
[9] Sanhati Banerjee, GI and the Handloom Copyright Debate, The Voice of Fashion (August 7, 2019), available at: https://www.thevoiceoffashion.com/fabric-of-india/features/gi-and-the-handloom-copyright-debate–2939
[10] Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Piracy, Biopiracy and Borrowing Culture: Cultural Heritage and the Globalization of Intellectual Property (2006).
[11] Christoph Antons, What Is “Traditional Cultural Expression”? International Definitions and Their Application in Developing Asia, WIPO (2009), available at: http://wipo.int/portal/en/news/2009/
[12] Arewa, supra note 10.
[13] WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (May 24, 2024), available at: https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text/592504
[14] Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity (2010), available at: https://www.cbd.int/abs/doc/protocol/nagoya-protocol-en.pdf
[15] Arewa, supra note 10.
[16] Anupama Mallik, Santanu Chaudhury and T.B. Dinesh, An Intellectual Journey in History: Preserving Indian Cultural Heritage, LNCS 8158 (2013).