In recent years, conversations around fashion and design have begun to circle a familiar question. When global brands draw from recognisable visual traditions, what, exactly, are they taking, and from whom?
The language that emerges in response is often one of ownership. Terms such as appropriation, misuse and extraction suggest that patterns, techniques and styles can be claimed in ways that extend beyond the boundaries of law. Yet this raises a more difficult question: what, precisely, can be owned?
In legal terms, the answer is relatively clear. Copyright protects specific expressions; trademarks, identity and origin. Outside these frameworks, ownership becomes harder to define. Aesthetic languages, patterns, motifs, techniques, rarely belong neatly to individuals, communities or nations. They move across time and geography, shaped by exchange, adaptation and reinterpretation. To treat them as collective property in a general sense is to impose a legal logic on a cultural reality that does not quite conform to it.
This does not mean that all borrowing is unproblematic. But it does suggest that the terms of the debate require greater precision. In many recent cases, several claims are made at once: that a design is inauthentic because it is industrially produced; that it is exploitative because it draws from a cultural source; and that it is troubling because of its price. These are distinct arguments, though they are often folded into one.
The question of technique is the most straightforward. A textile produced through industrial printing is not the same as one made through labour-intensive processes such as tie-dyeing, handblock printing or other manual methods. But unless a product claims a specific method of making, the distinction is one of translation rather than deception. Design has always moved between materials and processes, carrying ideas across different forms of making.
The question of price is more revealing. Luxury operates by placing familiar forms within a different economic frame. The discomfort that arises when a culturally recognisable pattern appears at a high price point is understandable. Yet price, in itself, does not determine legitimacy. To object on these grounds is to blur the line between economic critique and cultural claim.
What this also suggests is that technique, market positioning and price are not separate concerns, but part of a dynamic relationship. A labour-intensive process will often demand a higher price; a lower price point may require industrial production; and market positioning determines how both are framed and perceived. These elements do not exist in isolation—they shape one another. To critique one without accounting for the others is to risk misunderstanding how the system actually functions.
More importantly, it can obscure a deeper contradiction. The widespread availability of low-cost, industrially produced imitations has done far more to reshape traditional craft practices than any luxury reinterpretation. In parts of western India, roller-printed textiles that mimic bandhani now dominate markets where hand-tied versions once prevailed. Textiles that were once made for everyday use have, in many cases, been displaced by cheaper alternatives. Yet this transformation—arguably one of the most significant pressures on craft systems—rarely attracts the same level of scrutiny.
Part of the reason lies in visibility. Luxury brands are highly visible, symbolically charged and easy to critique. Industrial production, by contrast, is systemic. Its effects are less visible, even as they are more pervasive.
But the difficulty also lies in how the debate is framed. By treating different forms of borrowing as equivalent, the language of appropriation risks flattening important distinctions. There is a difference between direct copying, industrial replication and aesthetic translation. To collapse them into a single category is to lose sight of how design actually operates.
At the same time, it would be reductive to dismiss concerns about cultural use altogether. Cultural forms are not neutral; they are embedded in systems of knowledge, labour and value that are unevenly recognised and compensated. The question is not whether design draws from these systems—it always has—but how it does so. There is a meaningful distinction between extraction and participation: between taking a form and disengaging it from its context, and working in ways that acknowledge or sustain the systems from which it originates.
This is where the language of ownership begins to falter. To claim that a pattern or technique belongs to a community in the same way that a trademark belongs to a company is to impose a legal model on a cultural reality that does not fully align with it. Cultural forms are not static assets; they are processes. They evolve through use, circulation and reinterpretation. Attempts to fix them within rigid boundaries risk reducing them to surface—precisely the outcome such arguments often seek to resist.
The tendency to frame these questions in national terms adds another layer of complexity. Design is often described as “Indian” or “European,” as though cultural production were contained within political borders. In practice, these associations reflect histories of exchange rather than ownership. Techniques migrate, motifs circulate and meanings shift. To assign them to a single origin is to simplify a far more entangled history.
This tension is not new. In early 20th-century India, debates around industrialisation and craft revealed similar fault lines. While Mahatma Gandhi advocated for hand-spun textiles as a form of economic and political resistance, Rabindranath Tagore questioned whether such prescriptions risked becoming overly prescriptive or burdensome in a country marked by deep poverty and inequality. The issue was not whether craft should be valued, but how that value might be sustained—and by whom.
That question remains unresolved. Handmade goods are, by their nature, more expensive. To insist on their universal adoption is to overlook the realities of those for whom cost is decisive. At the same time, to accept their displacement without question is to risk the gradual erosion of cultural systems that cannot easily be rebuilt.
Legal protection has an important role to play in safeguarding specific expressions and preventing direct exploitation. But it cannot, on its own, resolve the broader dynamics of cultural exchange. Nor can the extension of ownership claims into the public domain provide a workable solution.
The challenge is not to prevent cultural forms from circulating, but to understand the conditions under which they do. Cultural forms are both shared and situated. They belong to no one, and yet they are not without context. The task is not to stop design from borrowing, but to ensure that, in the process, form does not become entirely detached from the systems which give it meaning, and that the histories, labour and cultural lineages from which these forms emerge are acknowledged with due credit and transparency.
Peter D’Ascoli is a New York–born designer and author based in New Delhi, working at the intersection of craft, textiles and cultural history.