Kolhapuri Chappals at ₹1.16 Lakh: What Fashion Forgets When It Borrows

A Kolhapuri chappal appeared on the Prada runway. It was priced at ?1.16 lakh and described as a “leather flat sandal”. It bore no trace of Kolhapur. It is not uncommon, of course, for objects to migrate, through conquest, through commerce, through the shape-shifting ambitions of taste. But what the chappal had undergone was not migration. It was exfoliation. Its context—the geography of its tanning, the lineage of its stitch, the caste economies that still structure its production—had been pared away. What remained was form. A silhouette, now lacquered with the authority of Milan.

This is how luxury often treats the vernacular: not as archive, but as quarry. Earlier this year, Nordstrom retailed a cotton jhola bag from Japanese brand Puebco as an “Indian Souvenir Bag” for $48, virtually identical to the kind sold outside CST station in Mumbai for a hundred rupees. Reformation repackaged mirrorwork into “festival sets”; Oh Polly rediscovered the lehenga as a “tiered maxi skirt”. Each act insists it is homage. Each avoids the question: homage to whom?

What is at stake is not just credit, but narrative. Whose labour enters fashion history, and whose remains oral, regional, unnamed? In the language of luxury branding, provenance is slippery. “Inspired by” is the bleach that lightens, sanitises, and obscures the hand that made it.

India has 470 products under Geographical Indication (GI) protection. The Kolhapuri chappal earned its tag in 2019, a legal classification meant to anchor it to eight districts across Maharashtra and Karnataka. In theory, this mark functions like a passport, affirming origin, protecting identity. In practice, it is almost entirely useless in the marketplace of fashion, where the real currency is perception. The GI tag cannot compel Prada to acknowledge Kolhapur, nor can it reverse the semiotic laundering that occurs when a craft tradition is passed through the machinery of European minimalism. A chappal made in Kolhapur, from buffalo hide cured in limestone and stitched with cotton thread, carries weight: in the accumulated matter of caste, heat, scent, and familial transmission. A chappal sold off a runway is light. It floats. It belongs to everyone and no one.

The artisans whose designs are lifted remain largely anonymous, by design. The anonymity is built into the ecology of craft, where knowledge is undocumented and uncapitalised. There are no brand names to defend, no IP portfolios to litigate. The artisan exists not as author but as conduit, a hand, not a name. This dislocation is what makes the theft so elegant. You cannot steal from someone the law refuses to fully see.

Meanwhile, fashion PR narratives swell with the optics of benevolence. Brands issue airy declarations about “honouring traditions”, occasionally commissioning limited-edition capsule collections “inspired by Indian artisanship” with launch events held in London or Paris, not Lucknow. It would be easier if this were malice. It is not. It is habitus, in the Bourdieu sense: a deeply ingrained grammar of looking, extracting, and reframing. In this model, the hand that weaves is always too rough, too brown, too loud for the showroom.

One is not saying that craft traditions should remain frozen in place like museum artefacts. Circulation is part of culture. But circulation without acknowledgement is not exchange; it is consumption. And consumption, without narrative, becomes a kind of aesthetic cannibalism.

This pattern, of course, is not confined to India. Fashion has long harvested from the margins: the keffiyeh reimagined as a Burberry scarf, the Yoruba gele reinvented as “sculptural headwear”, the Japanese kimono flattened into a silk robe with no sleeves and no context. What ties these acts together is not simply aesthetic borrowing, but the asymmetry of power beneath it—the freedom of the West to remix, and the expectation that the rest of the world will be flattered by inclusion, even when anonymised.

A few years ago, when Louis Vuitton began selling monogrammed keffiyeh on its website, it was accused of appropriating a symbol of Palestinian resistance. Gucci was sharply criticised for marketing an $800 “Indy turban” that disregarded its religious significance, with the Sikh community warning that the turban is a sacred religious symbol, not a fashion accessory. Burberry’s nova check, once emblematic of working-class “chav” culture and derided in the tabloids, has been rehabilitated by fashion as ironic Y2K luxury, without reckoning with the class stigma once weaponised against its wearers.

All of this underscores a central truth: appropriation often happens not through ignorance but through omission of context, meaning, and the source communities. At the centre of this paradox is a deep confusion between exposure and visibility. A Kolhapuri chappal on a European runway is not the same as a Kolhapuri chappal being recognised, economically and culturally, within the system that sells it. Visibility suggests a light has been shone. Exposure only means something has been used.

It is tempting to think the tide is turning. That social media callouts will force brands into a more ethical consciousness. But consciousness is not the same as change. Fashion adapts faster than reform. What would it mean for luxury to treat origin not as an inconvenience but as a form of authorship? Not as a whisper on a tag, but as a structuring presence? Not a capsule collaboration, but a redistribution of narrative space? These are questions the industry is ill-equipped to answer. The artisan, after all, cannot attend the afterparty.

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