Before we talk about who is taking what from whom, we need to agree on what fashion actually is. Because the industry has been operating for decades under a definition so convenient it borders on dishonest.
Fashion is not the invention of new things. It never has been. At its truest, fashion is the living record of human culture, a language made of fabric, colour, pattern and shape that communities have used across centuries to say who they are, where they come from, what they believe and who they belong to. A kimono is not a garment. It is a compressed history of Japanese aesthetics, philosophy and social order. Equally a Scottish tartan kilt isn’t a skirt. It is a declaration of clan, of heritage, of resistance. The vibrant embroidered textiles of the Zapotec communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, aren’t a print. They are a visual language that predates every fashion house currently operating in Paris, Milan or New York by several hundred years.
This is the foundation. Fashion, at its origin and at its best, is the celebration of things that already exist, stories that communities have been telling through cloth for generations. The moment an industry forgets that, it stops being creative and starts being extractive.
The fashion industry forgot a long time ago.
What replaced the original definition was a newer, more profitable one. In the hands of global fashion, inspiration became a euphemism for taking. The process is consistent and well documented. A designer travels, or more often simply scrolls, and encounters something that belongs to a community with centuries of context behind it. The community is poor, geographically remote, legally underprotected, or simply not powerful enough to push back effectively. The designer takes the pattern, the silhouette, the motif, strips it of its story, places it on a runway with a press release describing it as “a tribute” or “an exploration” or “a love letter to a rich cultural heritage,” and sells it at a price point the original community could not access in ten years of their own labour. The community receives nothing. The designer receives a standing ovation.
This is what the industry calls inspiration. Most honest people would call it something else.
In August 2025, Adidas and designer Willy Chavarria released a shoe called the Oaxaca Slip-On. It featured a woven leather surface, an open heel and a thick rubber sole. Mexican authorities identified it immediately as a direct copy of the huarache sandal, a handmade design originating from the Zapotec Indigenous community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag in Oaxaca. The shoe was conceived by a designer of Mexican heritage and produced by a German corporation. It was reportedly manufactured in China. The community that created the original design, the community whose name was placed on the product, received nothing. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum addressed the matter at a national press conference, saying that large companies regularly take products, ideas and designs from Indigenous communities and that her government would pursue legal reforms to prevent it. Adidas eventually issued a public apology. Chavarria said he was deeply sorry the design was appropriated rather than developed in meaningful partnership with the Oaxacan community.
The apology isn’t the point. The point is that this was not a mistake. It was a pattern.
The Adidas case did not arrive in isolation. It joined a long and specific list. In 2019, Carolina Herrera released a Resort collection featuring embroidery from three separate Mexican Indigenous communities, the Otomi, the Zapotec and the Saltillo sarape tradition of Coahuila, without acknowledgement, permission or compensation. The brand’s creative director described it as a tribute to the richness of Mexican culture. The Ministry of Culture of Mexico wrote a formal letter demanding an explanation for how collective Indigenous property had been privatised for commercial gain. In 2021, Zara was accused of copying a pattern from the Mixteca Indigenous community of San Juan Colorado. In the same year, Anthropologie was cited for using designs from the Mixe people of Santa Maria Tlahuitoltepec. Shein was denounced in 2022 for using Mayan designs from Yucatan, Campeche and Quintana Roo without any form of compensation. Isabel Marant, Ralph Lauren, Mango, Pippa Holt and Zimmermann have all faced similar accusations from Mexican authorities across different years. Every single one of these cases involved a wealthy global brand, an Indigenous community with no legal army, and a design that had been carried across generations as one of the only forms of cultural and economic ownership that community possessed.
The industry’s response, when it bothers to respond at all, follows a script. The word tribute appears often. So does inspired by. So does pays homage to. What these phrases share is that they place the taking within the vocabulary of admiration, as though stealing becomes acceptable when done with sufficient affection. A community does not feed its children on admiration. A tradition that has survived colonisation, poverty and centuries of erasure does not need to be honoured on a runway in Milan. It needs to be left alone, or engaged with on terms the community itself defines, with compensation flowing in the direction of the people who actually built the thing.
The more honest question, the one the industry avoids with great skill, is what gives any of these brands the right to decide that a sacred design is available for reinterpretation. The huarache sandal of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag is not in the public domain. It is not an abandoned tradition waiting to be revived by someone with a better platform. It belongs to a living community that makes it by hand, sells it for survival, and has carried its design through generations as an act of cultural continuity. Placing it on a shoe sold through global retail channels, removing it from its context, stripping it of its story and attaching it to a brand worth billions is not inspiration. It is the continuation of a colonial logic that has always decided what belongs to whom based on who has the power to take it.
Traditional clothing and textiles are not raw material. They are finished works. The embroidery patterns of the Otomi people of Tenango de Doria represent a visual cosmology developed over centuries. The woven designs of the Zapotec communities encode spiritual and social meaning that has no equivalent in any fashion dictionary. When a brand lifts these patterns and sells them as boho prints or artisanal details on garments priced at several hundred dollars, it is not engaging with culture. It is consuming it, the way fast fashion consumes everything: quickly, without credit, and at a profit that flows exclusively upward.
The word inspiration has done enormous damage in this industry. It has been used to justify the wholesale extraction of creative heritage from communities that were already surviving under economic and political conditions not of their making. It has dressed up robbery in the language of appreciation. It has placed the burden of proof on the people being taken from, requiring them to prove ownership of things their grandmothers made and their grandmothers’ grandmothers made before them, in legal systems designed by and for the people doing the taking.
Mexico has been fighting this particular battle longer and more publicly than most, but the pattern exists wherever fashion looks at a culture richer in history than in legal resources and decides that constitutes an opportunity. The batik traditions of West Africa. The beadwork of the Maasai. The kente cloth of the Akan people of Ghana. The indigo dyeing traditions of communities across South and Southeast Asia. All of it has appeared on runways and in collections described as globally inspired, culturally informed, aesthetically diverse, while the communities those descriptions reference received nothing but the occasional photograph of a white model wearing their identity as a seasonal look.
The question that fashion needs to sit with is not whether cultural exchange is possible. Exchange is possible. Exchange requires consent, conversation, compensation and credit. What the fashion industry has been doing is not exchange. It is extraction dressed in the language of creativity, and the communities losing their heritage to it are running out of patience for the apology that arrives after the collection has already sold out.
A sandal made by hand in Oaxaca over generations is not a trend. It is not a reference. It is not a mood board. It is the intellectual and spiritual property of a community that built it in the first place, and the fact that the industry is only now being forced to acknowledge that, under legal and governmental pressure, tells you everything about who the system was built to serve.
It wasn’t built to serve the people in Villa Hidalgo Yalálag. And until the industry decides that it should be, the word inspiration will continue to mean exactly what it has always meant in this context.
Taking.
