Fendi Erased India. Would It Have Erased Paris?
Fendi’s $10,000 Baguette bag carries 39,500 beads and 475 mirrors, every one of them set by hand. That handwork, more than 138 hours of it, was done not in Italy but in Mumbai, India. Yet the product page said only “Made in Italy.”
Had that embroidery come from the hands of a Paris atelier, Fendi would have put “Paris” at the top of the price tag.Had it come from a workshop somewhere in Scandinavia, that name would not have gone missing either.What was erased was India.
01/Fendi Knew
The bag in question is a re-edition of the Baguette 26424 from Fendi’s Fall/Winter 2026-27 collection. To Indian eyes, it looked exactly like the mirror embroidery of Gujarat and Rajasthan, and above all like the cloth bags carried during Navratri, the autumn festival. In mid-September, Harsh Goenka, chairman of the RPG Group, and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, founder of Biocon, raised the issue publicly, and the Indian press picked it up everywhere. Social media called it the “Navratri bag.”
The facts show that Fendi was not unaware. The embroidery was done by Indian artisans at Chanakya, an embroidery atelier in Mumbai; the leatherwork and assembly were done in Italy. In April, in a video presenting a bag of similar design, Fendi introduced the Chanakya artisans by name. A week before the controversy broke, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Fendi’s chief creative officer, was at the opening of the exhibitions marking Chanakya’s 40th anniversary in Mumbai. One of them was developed with her. As criticism grew and The Guardian asked questions, Fendi issued a statement citing its “creative partnership” with Chanakya of more than three decades, and changed the wording on its product page. As of September 26, Fendi’s site reads: “Made in Italy and India by Chanakya artisans.” There was no apology. The campaign page for the same bag, “FENDI Celebrates the New Icon of Craft and Self-Expression,” still mentions neither India nor Chanakya.
Fendi knew, and in other places it spoke the name. In the video that introduced the artisans and at the exhibition, the places where Indian hands make the brand shine, the name was there. Only where the price is set, next to the price tag, was it left out.
Fendi is not alone. Ralph Lauren has drawn the same criticism three times this year. After jhumka earrings in March and a bandhani skirt in April, at New York Fashion Week in September it described a gown, whose embroidery Indian designers and media identified as zardozi, only as “hand-applied embellishments.” Each time, there was not even a denial. I wrote about that in the previous essay, “Ralph Lauren Named the Fabric. It Did Not Name India.“
02/Choosing Which Names to Wear
Brands pick and choose names. In a photo with a celebrity, they put that person’s name in large type. Names that raise them are added; names they fear will lower them are removed. That is the psychology of consumption.
They believed writing “India” would not help sales, and would, if anything, lower their standing. They calculated that if they said nothing, people would assume the brand made it itself, or that some European artisan did. They want to take the design, but when it comes time to speak of it, they want to hide it. That is a shallow sales trick, and its root is cultural prejudice.
An old structure comes to mind: colonial hands put to work, while the final touch, the bargaining and the name were taken by the home country. When Goenka asked, “When will luxury brands stop colonising our crafts?”, he was seeing the same structure. To avoid any misunderstanding: Chanakya is a company that works with 1,400 artisans and even runs a craft school. What this essay takes issue with is not those artisans’ working conditions but the name. One side does the work, and the side that touches it last takes the name and the price. That is what resembles the colonial era.
03/Who Is the Real Designer?
The calculation to make it look like the brand’s own depends on the eye of the viewer. To someone who grew up never seeing Indian patterns, this bag looks like Fendi’s creation. To someone who grew up with those patterns, someone who knows that culture, it is an Indian copy at a glance. That is why Indians named it the “Navratri bag” the moment they saw it.
Fendi knew who did the embroidery. But it did not see what those patterns mean to the people who grew up with them. Fendi’s designer chose this design with only their own eyes. It is the chronic problem that recurs whenever Western designers have not learned the culture and its history.
The Indian artisans who first made these patterns did not copy them from anything. They made them out of the life and festivals of their villages and passed them down by hand, generation after generation. Fendi’s designer looked at that and made the bag. Then who is the real designer?
A designer who truly has something of their own shares the name with no one, because it is their pure creation. But a brand short on creativity has to borrow something: a celebrity’s name, or an imitated design. And then it tries to put the same price on it as on pure creation.
04/“If It Were French” Is Not a Hypothetical
In the Ralph Lauren essay I asked: had the embroidery come from a French atelier, would they have dropped the name? The example then was Chanel. Chanel bought Lesage, the Paris embroidery atelier, and every year holds a separate collection that puts ateliers like it front and center, selling their names as part of the product. French hands, and the name becomes advertising. Indian hands, and the name is erased.
This time there is a clearer answer, and it comes from the Lesage family itself: proof that hiding is not a necessity. Jean-François Lesage, son of the Lesage family, founded the embroidery atelier Vastrakala in Chennai, India, in the early 1990s. From the start, its labels read “Paris – Madras.” “It would have been unthinkable to us to sign only ‘Paris,'” he has said. The atelier became part of the House of Lesage in 2014.
Prada offers the same answer. After being criticized in 2025 for copying the Kolhapuri, India’s traditional sandal, it launched “PRADA Made in India x Inspired by Kolhapuri Chappals,” made by Indian artisans. India’s name went into the product’s name.
The finest French embroidery family could write India’s name.So could another high-priced Italian designer brand.Fendi did not fail to.It chose not to.
05/A Name’s Worth Follows Income
Which names look expensive is decided not by a country’s handwork but by where that country and its people stand in the world. And that standing changes once a people can make a decent living.
The best evidence is Italy itself. Until the early 1950s, Italian clothing was treated as a second-rate imitation of Paris. “Made in Italy” became a label that commands a high price only after the 1951 Florence fashion show and the postwar boom. In the 1950s, “Made in Japan” meant cheap; today brands compete to feature Japanese denim and Japanese artisans. Fendi is using a label its own country earned barely 75 years ago to hide the hands of a country that has not yet earned one.
This prejudice is not Europe’s alone. Even Goenka, criticizing Fendi, compared the bag to “a ₹500 bag available in the streets of Gujarat.” A titan of Indian business, too, measured his own country’s handwork by its street-market price. Three days later he posted a clarification: the bag is constructed in Italy, and its embroidery is handcrafted by the artisans of Mumbai-based Chanakya, “a beautiful example of Italian design and Indian craftsmanship coming together.” The facts were corrected, but the name “design” still went to Italy. This is not the malice of any one people. It is a human habit: seeing the names of poor countries as cheap.
To those with empty pockets, their creation is only bread. To the well-fed, it looks like a means to feed desire.
06/When India Was Rich
History shows this sequence plainly. By the economic historian Angus Maddison’s estimate, around 1700 India accounted for roughly a quarter of the world’s output. In that era, Europe bought Indian cotton under Indian names. Calico comes from Calicut, a port on India’s west coast; chintz from the Hindi chint; dungaree, the workwear cloth, from Dongri in Mumbai. Bandana is the very bandhani that Ralph Lauren printed on a skirt this April without naming the country or the artisans. Indian cottons sold so well that Britain passed laws twice, in 1700 and 1721, banning their import and their wear, to protect its own wool and silk industries.
Then come the ships. The cradles of civilization, India, Peru, Egypt, held cultures built up over thousands of years, and craft was made on top of them. Because Europe built ships that could sail far, it could reach them. It took what it found, often plundered it, and developed it as its own. The place Vasco da Gama reached in 1498 was Calicut.
Even the companies Europe founded to trade with India carried India in their names. England founded the East India Company in 1600, and the Dutch and the French founded East India companies of their own. India was a name Europe chased. The trade was turned upside down after the Battle of Plassey in 1757. In 1765 the British East India Company took the right to collect taxes in Bengal. From then on, the Company used taxes collected in India to buy Indian cloth to sell in Europe, and forced weavers to sell only to the Company, at prices the Company set. Indian hands made it, the Company set the price, and London took the name and the profit. The colonial structure I described earlier is not a metaphor. It happened. Britain then copied Indian cottons by machine, mass-produced them and sold them back to India, and India’s handloom weavers lost their livelihoods.
Once India was poor, the names changed. The teardrop “buta” woven into Kashmir shawls was copied in the 19th century by weavers in Paisley, a small town in Scotland, who began producing it in bulk. Today the world calls that motif “paisley.” The wool kept Kashmir’s name, cashmere, but the pattern took the name of the town that copied it. The raw material was bought. The creation was taken.
One thing should be clear. Borrowing from other cultures is not something only Europe has done. China’s blue-and-white porcelain was made with Persian cobalt and Islamic motifs, yet no one calls it Persian ceramics. Borrowing is a habit of humanity as a whole. What set Europe apart was not morality but ships: the power to go far, take, and not pay, and the power to turn that into rules.
07/Beef Carries Three Countries
on a pack of EU beef
born // raised // slaughtered1Country
on a $10,000 bag
Those rules live on today, on the price tag. Nearly every product in the world carries its origin. Fruit does. Beef does. The European Union requires beef to list, separately, the country where the animal was born, where it was raised and where it was slaughtered. A $10,000 bag needs to name only the last country.
European origin rules give the name to the country of the last substantial processing. Embroider for 138 hours in Mumbai, attach the leather and assemble it in Italy, and it is “Made in Italy.” It is not that Fendi’s bag carried no origin. It carried only the last country. Italian law separately reserves “100% Made in Italy” for products whose design, planning, processing and packaging all take place in Italy. In effect, the law itself admits that plain “Made in Italy” is not all Italian. The structure in which the colony worked and the home country finished and named the product survives today in the form of origin rules.
Consider the logic of price. Had those 138 hours been worked in France or Italy, where labor is expensive, a $10,000 price might be understandable. Average hourly labor costs in the euro area were €38.20 in 2025. At 138 hours, labor alone comes to more than €5,000. Indian wages are a fraction of that. How much Fendi paid Chanakya has not been disclosed. But if what props up the price is the impression of “European artisans’ hours,” then where those hours were actually spent is information the buyer should have.
Pay a fraction of that where labor is cheap, charge the same price, and erase that fact from the price tag, and it is not profiteering. It is fraud. The law simply allows it. That it is legal, and that the industry has always done it this way, is the bigger problem.
The same thing happens inside Italy. In June 2024, a Milan court placed Dior’s Italian manufacturing unit, part of LVMH, the same group as Fendi, under court administration for a term of one year (it was lifted early, in February 2025). According to court documents, a bag a subcontractor delivered for €53 (an assembly price, excluding leather and hardware) sold in stores for €2,600. Armani bags made by subcontractors for €93 sold for €1,800, and workers in that supply chain were paid €2 to €3 an hour. All of it was “Made in Italy.” Dior itself faced no criminal investigation and did not comment on the cost figures.
But Italian authorities treated this as a matter of consumer deception and opened investigations. In August 2025, Italy’s competition authority fined Armani €3.5 million, finding that its ethical claims misled consumers because they did not match conditions at its subcontractors (Armani said it would appeal). Dior closed its investigation without any finding of infringement by committing €2 million over five years to support victims of labor exploitation. Italian authorities are already asking whether consumers were deceived.
Origin rules are the same for every product. The difference is that for high-priced designer brands, origin is the price. That is why it is high-priced designer brands made in Europe, above all, that move across those borders, deceiving consumers and making money.
08/In Music, This Would Be Plagiarism
If origin rules hide the name from the consumer, copyright rules hide it from the creator.
Take someone else’s music and release it under your own name, and we call it plagiarism; the law treats it as copyright infringement. In craft, the same act is not illegal.
Copyright protects a single, named creator, and it expires. In Korea and the United States, it lasts 70 years after the author’s death. Patterns and crafts built up by communities over thousands of years have no single identifiable author, and the law considers their term long expired, so it classifies them as public domain that anyone may use. That is why a brand can take them and sell them as its own without consequence.
Brands’ own property, by contrast, is guarded fiercely. Logos and trademarks are protected forever, as long as they are renewed. In July this year, Louis Vuitton won a first-instance ruling in its trademark suit against the Chinese tea brand Molly Tea (茉莉奶白). Molly Tea said it would appeal. In China there was a backlash arguing that Louis Vuitton’s flower motif itself resembles the traditional Chinese baoxianghua pattern, but it was Louis Vuitton that won in the court of first instance.
Other people’s thousands of years are free;your own logo is a perpetual monopoly.
We should also look at where these rules came from. Today’s copyright system grew out of the Berne Convention, signed in Europe in 1886, and was designed around the individual, named author. What communities had built over thousands of years went into the “no author” box. Just before that, in 1884-85, the European powers met in Berlin and set the rules for dividing up Africa. The countries with ships also wrote the rules. The nameless hand was not only left off the price tag. It had no name in the law from the start.
09/Plunder Already Has a Name
Some countries are trying to close this gap. In January 2022, Mexico enacted a federal law protecting the traditional culture and “collective intellectual property” of Indigenous communities. Using those patterns outside the community requires the community’s consent. The trigger was a series of public protests by the Mexican government over Carolina Herrera, Isabel Marant and Zara using Indigenous Mexican designs. In effect, the law made the whole community the copyright holder. But it is domestic law and cannot be enforced in other countries. In 2019, Nike canceled, just before release, a sneaker bearing the traditional pattern of Panama’s Indigenous Guna people, and apologized, after the Guna protested that their design had been used without consent. Panama had already passed a law recognizing Indigenous peoples’ collective intellectual property rights in 2000.
Outside design, the world has already called this plunder. In 1995, the University of Mississippi Medical Center received a US patent for healing wounds with turmeric powder. India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) countered that Indian households had used the method for thousands of years, submitting 32 references including ancient Sanskrit texts, and the US Patent and Trademark Office revoked the patent in 1997. The world called this kind of thing “biopiracy.” In other fields, taking someone else’s tradition under your own name has already been called plunder. And in May 2024, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) adopted a treaty requiring patent applicants, when an invention is based on genetic resources or associated traditional knowledge, to disclose the country of origin or the Indigenous people or local community that provided that knowledge. It takes effect once 15 countries ratify it, and that number has not yet been reached. The patent system’s first remedy for piracy was not money. It was “name your source.”
Design is still only halfway there. The Riyadh Design Law Treaty, adopted in November 2024, says countries “may require” design applicants to provide the information they know about relevant traditional culture. It is optional, not mandatory, and applies only when a design is registered. As of September 2026, only four countries, Albania, El Salvador, Georgia and Saudi Arabia, have ratified or acceded, far short of the 15 needed for it to take effect. It does not even reach products sold without design registration. Negotiations at WIPO to protect traditional culture as a whole, including crafts, patterns and music, have run since 2000, 26 years now, without agreement. The United States opposes the draft’s provisions for perpetual exclusive rights.
“They don’t know the law” is also true. The turmeric patent was overturned not by the Indian households and villages that had put turmeric on wounds for generations, but by a government research body. Brands’ legal teams know very well that communities have no means of defending their own rights.
10/Due Rights
So I argue this: when a traditional culture is used in design, that culture should be granted its due rights. If copyright is a system that protects creation, creation over thousands of years deserves protection too. Taking it cheaply and carelessly because its owners do not know the law is plunder.
Craft is art and technique brought into daily life. Today, the work of many craftspeople is protected as creative art. The Berne Convention covers works of applied art, and the copyright laws of the UK and India specifically protect “works of artistic craftsmanship.” Made by a named craftsperson, it is art. Made by a nameless community, it is free. Ignoring it simply because it is anonymous is not the corporate ethics a large company should have.
Two objections will come. The first: who holds the right? Mirror embroidery exists not only in Gujarat and Rajasthan in India but also in Sindh in Pakistan. Mexico has already shown the answer: make the community, not an individual, the rights holder, and pay into a community fund. The second: a perpetual monopoly would lock up a public domain that everyone should be able to use. The answer is in the word “due.” What is asked for is not a ban on use but credit and a fair fee. The point is not to lock up the public domain. It is to stop its free privatization.
This is not an argument for “don’t take.” Fashion has always borrowed from other cultures, and borrowing itself is how culture grows. In music, the problem is not sampling. It is sampling without a credit. If you take it, name it and pay what is due. And tell the buyer where that price was paid. That is how every culture is respected equally.
When India was rich, Europe sold goods under India’s name. When India became poor, Europe put its own name on India’s goods.
This time, the voice raised against Fendi was India’s. India is now beginning to open its eyes, to protect its own culture and to stop any further plunder.
© Young Park. Written at HEXA Communications, Porto, Portugal.
Press inquiries: young@thehexa.com