There is a strange rite of passage for Indian craft. It must leave home, become someone else’s muse, be renamed with moodier adjectives, walk an international runway, and only then will India look up and cry “Oh, this is ours!”
Sociologist Yuniya Kawamura explains that fashion is not legitimised by the site of production, but by the system that authorises the narrative:
“Fashion is a belief… it exists because the institution of fashion gives it the authority to exist.”
- Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology (2005)
So, do we lack an institutional narration powerful enough to make us look twice?
The West sees India first. That seeing crowns the object with legitimacy. And only after that coronation does India recognise it, desire it, and claim it back. This is what we might call the return gaze: when something feels valuable only after it comes back to us through someone else’s lens.
A Passport Stamp on Provenance
Take the Kolhapuri chappal.
For decades it existed firmly in the category of the everyday: functional, regional, inexpensive. It belonged to local markets. It was footwear, not fashion.
Until it was fashion.
Until Prada saw potential in its rawness, the hand-cut leather, the anti-design silhouette, the honesty of something made to last. Until it was pulled from the dusty rack of utility and placed in the glossy theatre of global aesthetics: artisanal, minimal, heritage.
Relabelled. Recontextualised. Returned.
And suddenly, the same India that once bargained for it now began discovering it. As if through new eyes.
The Archive Was Open All Along
India made objects the world now considers design breakthroughs.
Handloom was slow fashion before sustainability was branded. Natural dyes were clean beauty before clean had a marketing department. Upcycling was domestic commonsense long before it was runway activism. The ease of the dhoti and mundu predates Instagram’s obsession with the wrap skirt or sarong-style drape. Craft clusters worked on principles of community-owned production long before decentralisation was a Silicon Valley manifesto.
What contemporary fashion frequently markets as revolution, Indian craft practiced as infrastructure. But innovation is only recognised as innovation when someone powerful enough names it so.
The tragedy is not that India borrows Western lenses. Everyone borrows lenses. The tragedy is that India sometimes forgets it has its own sight.
It’s why Kantha became covetable only after being narrated as heirloom abroad. Why bandhani felt modern after being styled as psychedelic escapism. Why handcrafted leather sandals moved from market staple to wardrobe flex only after their supposed reinvention overseas.
A Loop With Visible Seams
But power loops eventually reveal their wiring. The return gaze is beginning to wear thin. Its mechanics are showing.
A generation fluent in remixing culture is also fluent in recognising asymmetry. Young India can now appreciate paradox without being threatened by it: one can love global fashion, critique its filters, consume trends, reverse-engineer narratives, and still question why taste needed a foreign sign-off in the first place.
Reshaping this is not about romanticising craft harder. It is not about marketing traditionalism louder; building archives that travel as reference points, criticism that treats craft as innovation, shops that normalise local design, media that positions Indian aesthetics as source material.
Lastly, we need to modernise our confidence in speaking about our craft.
To look first.
To name first.
To author first.