Scandinavian Scarf: High Fashion or a tale of cultural appropriation?

The international fashion obsession at the moment with Scandinavian scarves was praised for their minimalist aesthetic, “hygge”-infused warmth, design has been a lesson in how seemingly harmless trends can hide deeper issues of cultural appropriation and invisibilisation of non-Western practices. The scarf, reimagined in muted greys, ivories, and terrestrials of Nordic hues, is championed by European celebrities and luxury fashion brands as a symbol of stylish sophistication, green thinking, and effortless chic.

But underneath there is an unsettling phenomenon: the appropriation of an article of clothing historically part of multiple cultures, like India, without regard for its origins, iterations, or symbolism. Worse still, Western fashion brands and designers appropriated directly from Indian garments borrowing silhouettes, layering patterns, and draping techniques yet never giving due credit. The trail of inspiration is conveniently veiled, cutting the connection with Indian tradition, and allowing Scandinavian and European brands to reap stolen originality and creativity.

In India, the scarf-like dress is not merely an article of clothing it is steeped in religious, cultural, and socio-political identity. From the dupatta, which has been pivotal in defining modesty and grace in North Indian style, to the gamcha wrapped around working shoulders in Eastern regions, Indian scarves have always played visual, functional, and symbolic functions. They signify caste, land, gender, and even resistance like in protest movements where the scarf is used as a symbol of unity. But within fashion discourse dominated by Euro-Americans, these dense significations are erased and replaced by a lifeless, commodified scarf that neatly fits into Western consumption patterns. The Indian scarf originally rich in context is now an “inspiration” but not a thing with its own history worthy of respect and acknowledgment. Such a trend is not specific to scarves.

Global high fashion has long flirted with Indian textiles, embroideries, drapery, and colors—drawing their richness but not often acknowledging their origin or makers. Big fashion houses and designers have taken zari work, bandhani patterns, lehenga silhouettes in the guise of “boho chic” or “exoticism,” without regard to the communities traditionally women craftsmen of rural or marginalized Indian communities that preserved and transformed these crafts over centuries.

These works are stripped of political and historical background, reduced to attire, and trotted down Parisian or Milanese catwalks by European models draped in others’ cultural work. As the actual workers remain economically and socially off-stage, hidden from the reward and attention their work continues to generate. This dynamic is made worse by sustainability and fair fashion discourse, where Scandinavian and other Western brands use this rhetoric to position themselves as higher moral beings.

Northern European wool scarves are being promoted as green luxury, while the same market generally ignores khadi, handloom silks, or natural-dyed cottons from India, although these do possess an ecological ethos. This is a logic of legitimation that is colonial in its design: non-Western crafts only achieve market legitimacy when recreated by Western hands. The result is the perpetual erasure of Indian heritage within the very spaces that claim to celebrate authenticity and moral production. Ultimately, the appreciation of Scandinavian scarves in world fashion cannot be separated from the systems of cultural exploitation that still play out today.

The issue is not with the scarf, but with the way fashion operates as a system that appropriates meaning and profit from cultures to which it does not belong or give back. The invisibilisation of Indian fashion’s origins, the rebranding of its motifs as Western invention, the lack of recognition of Indian inspiration, and the marginalization of its makers are not regrettable mistakes—they are a part of the way the fashion economy operates. Without structural change that includes proper crediting, economic redistribution, and cultural responsibility, fashion will continue to don the disguise of diversity while respecting a history of appropriation and erasure.