Decolonising the runway: whose narratives are we wearing?
By Kate Kenny
Before the lights caress the runway, before the cameras erupt in a glittering storm, before the garments shimmer into motion, one question lingers quietly backstage, suspended in the hum of anticipation: whose stories are stitched into these seams?
Fashion, at its core, is not simply cloth, it is narrative. It carries memory, migration, and meaning within its folds. It is history worn upon the skin. Yet too often, these stories are borrowed, diluted, rewritten in the language of others.
Fashion is a living archive. Each thread holds echoes of trade winds and ancestral hands, each silhouette a whisper of where we have come from and where we are going. Consider the sari. More than a garment, it is a continuum of heritage, an emblem of identity that dances across borders, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, each region draping it differently to reveal caste, class, community, and politics. Under colonial rule, the sari became an act of resistance, a fabric that refused to bow. Yet when Dior reimagined it in the Spring Summer 2003 runway, it arrived unmoored from its story, a ghost of itself, stripped of the centuries woven into its pleats. Beautiful, yes, but emptied of its soul.
The same can be said of the kimono. Once a garment of ritual and reverence, it carried seasons within its silk, each motif a secret language of identity. When Jean Paul Gaultier presented his Fall Winter 2001 collection, the kimono became spectacle, sensualised and reinterpreted for Western eyes. Its symbolism melted beneath the spotlights, its meaning dissolved into costume.
Moments like these remind us that fashion is never neutral. Every hem, every cut, every drape holds the weight of belonging, resistance, spirituality, and memory. When luxury houses borrow from cultures without context, they risk not homage but erasure.
Whose narratives are we wearing, and at what cost?
Every garment carries a geography, a politics, a people. The Western canon of style has been shaped, often silently, by the extraction of others, the weaving of Indigenous, African, and Asian traditions into trends, divorced from their origins. Colonial powers once took cotton and indigo, silk and dye, but they also took stories, symbols, and artistry. The exploitation never ended, it simply changed form. Fashion houses profit, while the source communities remain uncredited and unseen.
There is a difference between appropriation and appreciation, though the border is thin and tender. Appropriation takes place without permission. Appreciation listens, learns, and honours. The difference lies in power, in consent, in reciprocity. Who profits, and who is silenced? When sacred prints are turned into festival wear, when so-called tribal patterns parade as novelty, when the global South becomes a mood board for the global North, we must ask, are we inspired, or are we exploiting?
True decolonisation begins with listening. With returning the microphone, the platform, the credit. With centring ancestral knowledge and local craft, not as trend but as truth.
In 2020, Isabel Marant faced backlash for using Mixe embroidery from Santa María Tlahuiotoltepec in Oaxaca without consent. The outcry rippled beyond fashion, prompting the Mexican government to advocate for Indigenous intellectual property rights. Slowly, the conversation shifted, from appropriation to collaboration. Brands like Nest now weave new relationships, connecting global designers with artisan collectives around the world, shifting the story from producer to partner. Through their Ethical Handcraft Program, artisans in over one hundred countries are recognised not as anonymous labour but as co-creators, the hands behind the haute.
Vivienne Westwood too understood this intertwining of ethics and artistry. Through her collaboration with the Ethical Fashion Africa Project, women in Nairobi turned recycled materials into exquisite creations, proving that sustainability and decolonisation can walk the same runway, side by side, radiant and radical.
To decolonise fashion is also to slow it down. To remember that sustainability was once the language of tradition. Natural dyes, hand weaving, repair, and reuse are not trends, they are ancestral technologies. To reject fast fashion is to refuse a system of extraction that echoes the empire, where Western consumption depends on invisible labour in lands once colonised.
Decolonising fashion is not a fleeting trend. It is a transformation. It requires rewriting policy, redistributing credit, reforming fashion education, and reimagining what beauty and ownership mean.
Fashion at its most divine is not costume but communion. It is the meeting of cultures in mutual respect, the celebration of humanity through the poetry of cloth. To honour a culture is to see it, name it, and pay it. To wear it without acknowledgment is to consume its spirit.
The future of fashion must move from consumption to connection, from ownership to offering. We must no longer wear culture as disguise but as devotion, knowing the names of those whose hands make our beauty possible.
Credit is the new couture.
