2025 made it crystal clear that fashion is not just about clothes or art or glamour or consumption: fashion is a signal.
2025 made it crystal clear that fashion is not just about clothes or art or glamour or consumption: fashion is a signal. Whether in everyday choices or corporate PR strategies, fashion tells a story about the illusion between public perception and reality. Historically, both fast and high fashion industries have always reflected ongoing politics; colonial extraction appears in fabric choices, wealth disparities affect consumer access, socioeconomic instabilities influence aesthetic choices, and discriminations structure visibility and success.
Fascism harnesses fashion’s ability to enforce a subconscious theology onto millions of viewers in a highly unstable political time.
Extracting silhouette without soul
A quintessential example is how the classic kamarbandh worn by sepoys in the British Indian Army. It was later repurposed and popularised as the English cummerbund, attire of the aristocratic. Now a centre point of Western men’s formal wear, the cummerbund has travelled far and somehow lost the threads of its origins to India. Similarly, the instantly recognisable checked Madras fabric was adopted by the affluent in 1950s America, a staple in the preppy old-money wardrobe. However, “American old-money” doesn’t invoke the working-class or grandfather lungi most South Indians would associate Madras fabric with.
This past year’s co-optations emerged early on as the clean-girl look of slick-back buns paired with the wellness rituals of Anglicised yoga and turmeric lattes. While this seemingly harmless appropriation could’ve been easily ignored like the 2016 Coachella ‘bohemian’ wave, the additional dupatta-to-Scandinavian-scarf and ethnic-beadwork-to-Ibiza-summer pipelines exploded into discourses on social media.
The crux of the issue has to do with the disapproval, backlash, and disrespect South Asian women across the world face for embracing the same parts of their heritage that white women receive praise and approval for. While the ‘trendification’ of cultural identities is not a problem unique to South Asians, it is uniquely layered and complexified by caste-based inequalities that lie at the heart of South Asian culture and fashion. The extraction machine of working-class silhouettes, patterns, and fabrics applies similarly to upper-class South Asians who sell artisanal work for higher profits.
The narrative of complicity
Meanwhile, the American Eagle jeans campaign appeared on the big screen in Times Square. It went viral for the playfulness with which it made eugenicist suggestions about good genes. In the same year as US President Donald Trump calling brown and black immigrants “filthy, dirty, and disgusting” and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s “accidental” Nazi salute, the interpretations of the campaign are resounding to those listening. Here, fascism harnesses fashion’s ability to enforce a subconscious theology onto millions of viewers in a highly unstable political time.
In December 2025, Bhavitha Mandava made history as the first Indian to open a Chanel show, showcasing the Métiers d’Art 2026 collection in New York City’s Bowery subway station. In the same season, Givenchy’s “bedsheet skirt”—very clearly a dhoti/sarong— debuted on the runway, paralleled with the showcase of Prada’s ‘Kolhapuri chappals’, both also highly reminiscent of working-class attire.
Without real immigration related structures to support brown artists long-term, the representation of South Asianness is only as useful as its optics. Fascist aesthetics thrive on hierarchy, purity, and exclusion. From quiet luxury to genetic and racist dogwhistles to the fetishisation of tradition without labour, 2025 rehearsed these narratives through fashion propaganda.
…if radical care is our goal, we must look beyond the runway to see if the weaver has the same agency as the wearer.”
2025 showed us that there was a specific space for brownness in Western fashion, and it was as a figurehead or a placeholder. When considering the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness and the importance given to status and public perception within caste hierarchies, it becomes clear that these violences are reproduced internally within South Asian communities. The complicity of violent extraction trickles down into history, complicating purely anticolonial narratives of appropriation. To ignore this is to mistake representation for liberation, and complicity for progress.
A site of resistance
Rahul Mishra’s SS2026 collection reclaims the utility of the Madras check in its wholeness rather than abstracting it from its meaning and tradition. While high fashion is inaccessible, the argument here isn’t that the price is accessible, but that the production is marketed as edging towards ethical.
If Mandava represents being finally seen, Mishra represents the attempt to own the process at the level of Western designer peers. Mishra’s use of the working-class Madras check may be a powerful reclamation, but if radical care is our goal, we must look beyond the runway to see if the weaver has the same agency as the wearer.
We can start by embracing the values of anti-fashion that birthed Yohji Yamamoto, Vivienne Westwood, and Rei Kawabuko who pushed back on the 1980s Versace and Yves Saint Laurent dominance. Rather than minimalism or subversion, anti-fashion is about the refusal of purity, conformity, and power without accountability.
In a world telling us our heritage is endlessly consumable, imagining fashion differently asks us to centre labour, process, and collective responsibility: to reimagine our everyday adornments not as propaganda or signals, but as a practice of radical care and authenticity.