There is a phrase that circulates in creative departments with uncomfortable regularity: "we were inspired by." It is a phrase that does a lot of work. It makes borrowing sound like homage. It makes extraction sound like admiration. And it allows the industry to continue treating non-Western cultures as what they have functioned as for most of modern fashion's history: a mood board with no intellectual property rights and no invoice.
The reckoning is slower than it should be, but it is happening.
The structure of the problem
Cultural appropriation in branding is not primarily an aesthetic question. It is a power question. As Scherer's research in the Journal of Consumer Culture establishes, appropriation occurs when a dominant culture takes elements from a marginalized culture that has been systematically oppressed by that same dominant group, typically without permission, credit, or compensation (Scherer, 2022). The asymmetry is the point. Two cultures exchanging ideas freely is not appropriation. A dominant culture consuming the symbolic production of a marginalized one, profiting from it, and leaving the originators with neither credit nor revenue, is.
Louis Vuitton was ranked the most valued fashion brand in 2024 with a brand value of $41.6 billion. Meanwhile, approximately 80% of the Maasai people live below the poverty line, a community whose iconography, beadwork, and visual culture have circulated through Western fashion and branding for decades (Fashion United / Jabbar, 2014). The economic contrast is not incidental to the argument. It is the argument.
Young's concept of "content appropriation" from his work in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2005) is precise about the mechanism: the aesthetic is stripped of its sacred or social context and redeployed in service of a commercial logic entirely foreign to its origin (Young, 2005). A Navajo-style motif on an Urban Outfitters sweater is not a tribute to Navajo craftsmanship. It is the Navajo name and visual language being used to sell a product from which the Navajo Nation receives nothing, while the brand collects a premium for the cultural association.
The pattern of cases
Standout examples of what is sometimes called "cultural plagiarism" include KTZ's like-for-like replica of a garment designed by one of the last Shaman of the Canadian Inuit, Isabel Marant's appropriation of a design unique to the Purépecha from the Mexican state of Michoacan, Zimmerman's recreation of Huipil designs belonging to the Mazatec community, and Urban Outfitters' use of the Navajo name and Navajo-style motifs across a range of products from sweaters to underwear. In each case, the brand profited. In each case, the originating community did not. And in each case, the brand's initial response was some version of "inspiration" or "homage," as though naming the relationship changes its nature.
The pattern is consistent enough to be structural rather than incidental. Throughout history, the fashion industry has thrived by appropriating textiles, garment styles, and designs from other cultures to cater to Western tastes, essentially built on colonial exploitation. The legal frameworks that might address this remain inadequate: the World Intellectual Property Organisation has been negotiating international instruments to protect Traditional Knowledge and Traditional Cultural Expressions since 2000, with resolutions repeatedly deferred. (WIPO / Atmos, 2025)
As Sage Paul, executive and artistic director of Indigenous Fashion Arts, puts it directly: "The money is not going back into our communities; it's going to people who have lots of money, who are our oppressors and colonizers."
The semiotic layer
From a semiotics perspective, this is also a story about how meaning travels and what happens to it in transit. Oliver Mould's argument in Against Creativity (2018) is relevant here: when brands ignore the subversive or sacred origins of cultural expressions, they sanitise those expressions, producing something that carries the aesthetic signal of the original without any of its social or political content (Mould, 2018, Verso). A keffiyeh becomes a fashion scarf. Sacred geometric patterns become prints. The symbol is retained; everything it meant is removed.
This is what makes appropriation more than a question of credit or compensation, though it is both of those things. It is a question of semantic violence: the dominant culture does not just take the object; it replaces the meaning with one that serves its own commercial logic.
What exchange actually looks like
Kravets and Sandikci's framework in Marketing Theory (2014) identifies what genuine cultural exchange requires: collaborative agency, where both parties enter the creative process with mutual respect and shared benefit (Kravets & Sandikci, 2014). This is not a romantic or impractical standard. It has concrete operational requirements: explicit attribution of origin, economic reciprocity that flows back to source communities, and contextual integrity that preserves rather than strips meaning.
The counterexamples demonstrate what this looks like when done with intention. Valentino's collaboration with Aboriginal Australian artist Marlene Rubuntja involved working closely with the indigenous community, sharing profits, and highlighting the artists' stories alongside their work. Christian Dior's 2020 cruise collection partnered with Uniwax, a renowned Ivory Coast textile manufacturer, to create authentic African wax prints, preserving traditional techniques while providing economic opportunities for local communities. These share a structure: direct community involvement, fair compensation, proper attribution, and genuine exchange rather than extraction.
The distinction is operational as much as ethical. It is the difference between a brand team using a culture's visual language as source material and a brand team building a creative relationship with the people who hold that language. One produces a product. The other produces a partnership.
The designer's responsibility
Arturo Escobar's concept of "pluriversal" design thinking, developed in Designs for the Pluriverse (2018), offers the most useful frame for what decolonised branding practice might look like at the structural level (Escobar, 2018, Duke University Press). The pluriverse is a world in which multiple cultural worlds can coexist without one being subsumed by another, where Western aesthetic standards are not treated as the default from which all other aesthetics deviate. It is a design philosophy that rejects the "Universal Design" myth and the colonial logic it encodes.
In practical terms, this means treating provenance and credit not as optional metadata but as essential information that accompanies every cultural reference throughout the design and marketing process. It means building economic reciprocity into project budgets rather than treating it as a post-hoc consideration. It means distinguishing between being inspired by a culture and being in genuine creative relationship with it, and recognising that the second requires considerably more time, attention, and resources than the first.
The goal is not to stop being inspired by the world. The world is, legitimately, the material of creative work. The goal is to stop treating that material as free, and the people who made it as invisible.
References
- Young, J. O. (2005). Profound Offense and Cultural Appropriation. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63(2), 135–146. Link
- Kravets, O., & Sandikci, Ö. (2014). Competence and Strategy in Cultural Appropriation. Marketing Theory, 14(4), 469–484. Link
- Mould, O. (2018). Against Creativity. Verso Books. Link
- Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press. Link
- Scherer, M. (2022). Cultural Appropriation in Contemporary Brand Culture. Journal of Consumer Culture. Link
- Atmos / WIPO. (2025). Protecting Indigenous Designs From the Fashion Machine. Atmos Earth. Link
- Fashion Post / Good On You. (2025). Cultural Sustainability: Colonialism, Appropriation, and What Justice Looks Like. Link
