Cultural Appropriation within the Fashion industry: What, Why and How NOT to

Giulia Bottalico
Dec 3, 2025
6 min read

Updated: Dec 6, 2025

On Dec 1st '25, alongside my group-mates (a big shoutout to Hritika, Angelica, Thumalka and Amanda) I gave a talk - during my English For Fashion lecture - on a problem that has been affecting the Fashion Industry ever since the beginning of times: cultural appropriation.

This group project led to very interesting discoveries that I want to share with you guys because reading and inquiring about them is the only way to defeat the matter at issue.

What is cultural appropriation?

In this paragraph we'll call upon Barbara Pozzo's paper Fashion Between Inspiration and Appropriation (2020) that I found to be written with a very explaining language: easy to read and understand while maintaining an academic tone - adequate for a serious issue like the one we're dealing with.

It is important to assess, like Pozzo did, that European fashion has always been influenced by other countries and cultures': ever since the opening of the silk trade (IV century) textiles have been the most traded goods. Europeans got completely fascinated by the luxuriousness and sumptuousness of these new materials that, soon, started to have an influence on the fashion trands in vogue at the time within the "Old Continent". This is also the main reason why the names of natural fabrics actually originate from oriental languages: cotton from the Arabic "kutun", taffeta from the Persian "tāftan" and damask from the city of Damascus.

"Fashion is often the result of lucky encounters: taking inspirations from other cultures has always been a prevailing trend in the world of fashion" (Pozzo, 2020).

Still, "there are specific traditions that closely reflect the culture in which they were born and for this very reason, textiles have always been a perfect vehicle to establish, express and maintain people’s cultural identity. [...] Thus, is important to establish when inspiration becomes appropriation and, so, offensive." (ib.)

Cultural appropriation is offensive because it originates from deep-rooted racism.

In this regard, Pozzo quotes Mulvaney (2013):

"Cultural appropriation cannot be divorced from the prevalent issues of institutional racism and discrimination. In the context of fashion, it is still a white dominated industry benefiting from picking and choosing from different cultures to then make fashionable for white middle class buyers. Sub-cultures of class or race, nationality or religion should not just be something white people can try on as a novelty. You cannot play dress-up with the reality of other people’s lives or what they consider sacred”.

Also, this is the reason why cultural appropriation has been considered an issue only since the 1980s from an academic point of view and it became a topic of common interest only with the rise of social media. With the rise of post-colonial studies and fashion studies, even the white European scholars finally started to question their perspectives and to include but, most importantly, to give credit to the Native American people.

Still, the term cultural appropriation was not common at all and its practice was justified by the consumers who would scoff at Indigenous people trying to claim not only their pieces of art but also - and most importantly - the importance that the stolen motives/garments/accessories held for the indigenous culture and identities.

Thanks to the advent of social media, Native Americans gained a new platform to speak up on the issue and, so, more and more people came across this topic making it one of the hottest matter at the moment.

The rise of awareness that came in the early 2010s with the explosion of social media is to be seen when comparing the backlash that Victoria's Secret faced because of its 2012 Fashion Show to the public reaction for the Chanel catwalk held in January 1994.

Barbara Pozzo shows how, in the first case, the luxury lingerie company was held accountable for its mistake by both indigenous people and European consumers so much that they had to delete the footage of the model (Karlie Kloss) wearing a Native American sacred bonnet from the recording of the show that was aired on CBS.

On the other hand, Claude Eliette (Chief executive of Chanel at the time of the "satanic breasts dress" scandal) only had to briefly apologize to the Muslim consumers in fear of a drop in their sales in the Eastern world. Yes, both companied had to apologize but while the first one had to face world-wide repercussions and the Internet keyboard warriors with a following drop in sales, the second one only had to make a not-so-public statement.

Fashion Pedagogy

It is important, though, to assess that other than greed together with racism, education (fashion education in our case) plays a vital role in forging the cultural appropriation process.

Fiona Dieffenbacher wrote a paper on the matter of Fashion Pedagogy called Fashion Design Pedagogy: is Fashion Education Guilty of Contributing to the Problematic Discourse around Cultural Appropriation? (2018) that felt eye-opener. It was a true wake-up call for me.

According to Dieffenbacher "many fashion textbooks inadvertently endorse cultural appropriation as “inspiration” under the guise of design methodology". She then shares a few examples coming from a well-known fashion design textbook (of which she doesn't share the source) to demonstrate what she assessed.

The most important and heaviest issue - she found - is the problematic terminology (ethnic, tribal, folk, exotic) that reinforces the stereotypes.

When this language becomes normal, culture is reduced to visual resource rather than recognized as a living heritage.

Thus the second reason, within fashion pedagogy, consists of the methodologies: within the classroom, students learn to borrow patterns, silhouettes and motifs without cultural dialogue.

Fashion education becomes the first site where appropriation is produced.

As my colleague Thumalka wrote (still idrawing inspiration from Dieffenbacher): to reshape the system, pedagogy must move to context-based learning. Instead of collecting inspiration from Pinterest, we need primary research such as archives, museums, interviews and community collaborations.

Decolonial Future Perspectives

So, how do we decolonize fashion?

The decolonization of the fashion industry is a responsibility of academics, fashion designers but also and mostly of the consumers. Here are some suggestions my colleagues Amanda and Hritika have for you, whether you are an aspiring fashion designer or just an avid fashion consumer and, thus, enthusiast:

Understand the sacredness: study and learn how to recognize sacred or symbolic elements from one's culture. Also, ask yourself: "Why is this element important?" and "How does it shape one's life and cultural identity?";
To get the answers to the previous questions deepen your researches: engage with people and reliable sources from the culture you're learning about and, again, focus on the context;
Honor and cherish the artists by giving back to the culture/people you're taking inspiration from.
Credit the original indigenous artists and support them by shopping their collections if you're a consumer. Also, make noise: demand the brands for transparency which will naturally lead the brands to acknowledge their mistakes and give credit to the artisans. For example, thanks to the complaints and criticism Prada received for their Kolhapuri Chappal "inspired" by the Indian ones, the brand admitted their mistake and sought for collaborations with Indian artisans.
If you're an artist yourself, seek for collaborations (and always remember to share the compensation) just like Valentino's Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri did with Métis artist Christi Belcourt in 2015 or like Dior's collaboration with the Chanakya School of Craft for their 2023 Mumbai fashion show.

Remember: respectful partnership can transform inspiration into a bridge between cultures, rather than a violation of the aforementioned.

Valentino x Christi Belcourt

We don't know exactly when Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Picciolo (Valentino's creative directors at the time) came across Belcourt's paintings, but they did and so this amazing collaboration was born ... luckily may I add.

As Robert Everette-Green (The Globe and Mail, 2015) narrates, "after some long-distance discussion about paintings and fabrics, Valentino fabric designer Francesco Bova flew from Milan to Toronto with cloth samples based on Belcourt’s painting, Water Song. She [Christi Belcourt] took him to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where her painting The Wisdom of the Universe recently placed No. 1 in a People’s Choice poll, ahead of works by Alex Colville, Emily Carr and Paterson Ewen. Over tea, Bova showed Belcourt his samples, which included one printed fabric and two that were fully embroidered."

Belcourt loved the samples but, before accepting Valentino's proposal, she had to investigate: "I needed to know if they had ever been accused of cultural appropriation, if they had ever had models walk down the runway in feathers or headdresses, she said. I needed to find out what their environmental track record was. Water Song is all about the sacredness of water, and our responsibility to the water and the earth. It would go against everything I believe in to be involved with a company that was abusive to the environment and to the human beings from whom they source materials." (ib.)

At the end, just like in the fairytales, everything worked out for the best so that Belcourt "couldn't have dreamed of anything better. [...] There was nothing fo [her] to say but that [she] loved them"

Valentino and Christi Belcourt managed to prove that respectful inspiration is possible when empathy, collaboration, and acknowledgment lead the creative process.