Kolhapuri Chappals as ‘flat leather sandals’ by Prada Insight into the Issue of Cultural Appropriation in the Contemporary Fashion Field

Sammanfattning

The issue of cultural appropriation is a prevalent matter in fashion, as well as a matter of cultural preservation. The Spring Summer 2025 collection by Prada showcased several pairs of ‘flat leather sandals’ very closely resembling traditional Indian footwear, Kolhapuri chappals. The following paper addresses this issue through a sociological lens, applying decolonial understandings of power relations to the field of fashion as well as the phenomenon of cultural appropriation as a part of it. The methodology applied in the empirical analysis is a critical discourse analysis, which looks into four articles selected from prominent fashion media institutions in both the Western and Indian context. The aim of the study is to explore the power relations observable in the global fashion scene through the tracing of the Italian fashion house and the incident revolving around the Kolhapuri chappals. The thesis also takes great care in providing a synthetic understanding of the fashion discourse which this case is heavily reliant on, as well as its relation to modernity.