From Ralph Lauren to Fendi: Why Indian crafts are easy to borrow but hard to protect

Give it a few months, and it happens again. A big fashion house drops a new line, somebody on Indian Twitter — or X, or Instagram, take your pick — recognises a print, a weave, a shape that clearly didn’t originate in Milan or New York. Within hours, “appropriation” is trending, and the brand’s PR team is scrambling.

Fendi is the newest name in that rotation. Its ₹8.3 lakh “Navratri” bag prompted Harsh Goenka to call out the repackaging of India’s craft heritage as luxury with no credit given to the artisans behind it, and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw wasn’t far behind with the same complaint. Ralph Lauren, meanwhile, has practically made a habit of this in 2026 alone — a bandhani-print skirt in April, jhumka-style earrings shown off at Paris Fashion Week and quietly labelled “vintage accessories,” and just this month, a gown with unmistakable zardozi work described as nothing more than “hand-applied embellishments.” Zardozi has carried GI status since 2013. None of that made it onto the tag. Add Prada’s Kolhapuri-style sandals and Gucci’s turban moment to the pile, and you start to see it’s less a string of coincidences than a pattern nobody’s fixed.

Here’s the part that actually surprises people

You’d assume India has a legal weapon for exactly this — the Geographical Indication tag, the same status protecting Champagne or Darjeeling tea. Kolhapuri chappals have one. So does Banarasi silk. So does Lucknow zardozi. And yet none of it stopped any of the above.

The reason comes down to something almost embarrassingly simple: GI rights stop at the border. A tag registered in India carries no automatic weight in Italy or the US. To actually enforce it there, the same craft needs its own separate registration in that country — a process that costs money and time most weaving collectives simply don’t have lying around.

Then there’s the loophole brands have clearly figured out, whether or not anyone at Ralph Lauren would admit it out loud: never say the word. Copy a design closely enough that everyone recognises it, but skip the specific regional name, and the law has nothing to grab onto. “Banaras-style” instead of “Banarasi” clears the bar. “Hand-applied embellishments” instead of “zardozi” does the same. The Act only fires when a product falsely claims that exact origin — not when it merely echoes one.

And underneath all this sits a gap nobody quite built a fix for. GI law was written to protect where something comes from, not what it looks like. The motifs, the weave logic, the colour choices — none of that is covered once a brand stops short of naming the region. That’s the loophole every one of these controversies has walked straight through.

Add to that the artisans who’ve never even heard the term GI, let alone had the resources to chase a fashion house through foreign courts, and you get exactly what keeps happening: the outrage cycle does the identifying work, and the law, mostly, just watches.