Not Everything That Sparkles Begins on a Paris Runway
Made in India, Worn Everywhere
The Quiet Rise of Indian Fashion's Global Fingerprint
Indian craft had a complicated year on Western runways in 2026. A jhumka, the bell-shaped earring Indian women have worn for close to two thousand years, showed up on Ralph Lauren’s Fall/Winter 2026 Paris runway labeled only as an “authentic vintage accessory,” while its Indian cultural origins went unacknowledged. The issue is not simply whether a designer can draw inspiration from Indian craft, but what happens when that culture becomes the blueprint for a luxury aesthetic without the communities, histories, and makers behind it receiving the same visibility. Weeks later, the same brand released a wrap skirt for close to $500, its website citing “traditional Bandhani tie-dye techniques” with no mention of Gujarat, where the craft comes from, or of the Geographical Indication tag that protects the Jamnagari version of it in India. Real hand-tied Bandhani sells for a small fraction of that price in the markets where it is actually made.
It is part of a pattern that has been built for years. In 2025, only after a formal letter from a Maharashtra trade group representing thousands of artisans, Prada admitted that sandals across seven of the fifty-six looks in a men’s runway collection were lifted from the Kolhapuri chappal, a style with its own Geographical Indication tag, granted in 2019, tracing back to the 12th century. In 2018, Gucci sent a design nearly identical to the Sikh dastaar down a Milan runway on caucasian models, then sold it the following year as an “Indy Full Head Wrap” for $790 at Nordstrom. Even the dupatta has not been spared. Since 2024, it has circulated on TikTok relabeled the “Scandinavian scarf,” its origin swapped out every time a new lookbook picks it up. Together, the pattern has forced a bigger question into the open: what does Western fashion actually owe the cultures it keeps borrowing from?
Mohini Mrigaya has spent almost two decades answering a version of that question through her own work. She built Mrigaya’s Creations out of a 500 rupee craft kit, the kind of thing anyone might buy to pass an afternoon. She never set out to start a company. Her sister sold one of her early pieces for six thousand rupees, and that was enough to convince her to keep going. “For me, it was not just about fashion alone,” she says. “It was about customised jewelry and above all, my identity.” Every piece she makes, she says, begins with the same belief. “Jewelry is never merely an ornament. It is a memory that I craft. It is history worn with pride.” Watching a jhumka get renamed, quietly, on a runway, feels less like inspiration to her and more like erasure.
Growing up in India, jewelry in her family was never treated as an occasional luxury. It marked weddings, festivals, and milestones, passed from mothers to daughters as something closer to inheritance than accessory. Mrigaya still designs the same way today. “I don’t begin by asking what is fashionable,” she says. “I ask what deserves to be remembered.” Long before luxury houses discovered the allure of handcrafted earrings, embroidery, and vibrant textiles, she says, India had already mastered them. “They were not creating trends,” she says. “They were preserving a civilization.”
It brings her back to a question she keeps returning to: who actually owns culture? Her own answer is that nobody does, that culture belongs to whoever is willing to respect it, and that creativity was never supposed to have borders in the first place. Her issue was never with inspiration. It is with erasure, the moment a jhumka or a Bandhani print gets separated from the artisans who built the technique and the culture that carried it for generations. Kundan, Meenakari, and Jadau, the crafts she works in every day, are not simply manufacturing processes to her. They are living archives, refined over centuries and passed hand to hand. “A design can be copied,” she says. “A legacy cannot.”
That distinction is also why she has little patience for customers who ask why handcrafted jewelry costs more than a mass-produced version that only looks similar. “It must be measured by the journey it has taken,” she says. “Every handcrafted piece carries hundreds of decisions made by human hands.” It is the same labor nobody paid for when Ralph Lauren’s Bandhani skirt sold for $500 while the actual makers of the technique saw none of it.
Luxury is not defined by a logo. Luxury is defined by the number of skilled hands that refused to let a tradition disappear.
There is something particularly frustrating about watching a craft dismissed as outdated until a European label touches it and calls it new. “The craftsmanship has not changed,” she says. “The artisans have not changed. Only the audience has.” Still, Mrigaya sees the audience changing in a way that gives her real hope. It showed up at Coachella this spring, where Indian designers Rimzim Dadu, Tarun Tahiliani, and Masaba Gupta had their actual work credited by name instead of vague boho labeling. It showed up in Dior’s decade-long partnership with Mumbai’s Chanakya School of Craft, credited by name in the couture collection since the school’s founding in 2016, and in Sabyasachi opening his first store outside India in New York under his own name, not filtered through anyone else’s label. None of it fixes what already happened. But it is proof, to her, that the alternative is possible. “Authenticity travels,” she says. “You do not have to become someone else to be globally admired.”
India has always been the muse. The world just needs to catch up.
The finest things we wear were never the ones we bought. They are the stories we chose to carry.
The same pattern shows up from a second angle through her nail art studio, where mehndi-inspired detailing has traveled far past South Asian clients into the mainstream. She welcomes that, on one condition. “When we borrow aesthetics, we should also acknowledge their origins,” she says. “When we celebrate craftsmanship, we should celebrate the craftspeople. When we profit from tradition, we should invest in preserving it.” It is the same instinct that shapes the Learning and Development work she leads in her corporate job, work she does not see as separate from the jewelry at all. “One develops people,” she says. “The other protects culture. Both are acts of stewardship. Businesses create products. Brands create experiences. But legacies create meaning.”
She imagines a different kind of exchange. “Imagine collaborations where Indian artisans receive global recognition alongside international designers,” she says. “Imagine collections where ancient techniques are explained instead of renamed.” Asked what she hopes people will understand twenty years from now, Mrigaya does not talk about her own name. “I hope they remember that Indian design was never a trend waiting to be discovered,” she says. “It was a timeless language waiting to be understood.” She hopes the next customer buying a handcrafted piece asks a second question along with the first. “Who made this,” she says, “but also, whose story does this carry?” Culture, to her, is “not something we inherit to own. It is something we inherit to protect.”
Written by: Alabhya Prasad with a personal reflection by Mohini Mrigaya.
Photographer: Lens and ink studio: Prashant Dudbbate (India)
Models: Priya Rane (Blue Dress) & Mohini Mrigaya
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