In June 2025, luxury fashion brand Prada sent a braided brown leather sandal down a runway in Milan. Within days, the design was trending in India — but not for reasons one might expect. Prada’s sandal closely resembled an Indian Kolhapuri, a traditional sandal named after Kolhapur, a town in the western state of Maharashtra. Headlines, think pieces and social media videos quickly accused the brand of cultural appropriation.
In Maharashtra, leather artisan Shubham Satpute came across the Prada sandal as the controversy spread online. “There was nothing wrong with [Prada] taking inspiration, but we felt the term ‘Kolhapuri’ should have been used,” he says. After the initial backlash, Prada acknowledged the design’s Indian origins.
Satpute’s family has been making Kolhapuris since 1902. To the untrained eye, they might look like any other open-toed leather sandal. But to be called a Kolhapuri, they must follow a strict set of guidelines: They must have buffalo leather soles and goatskin uppers, with the leather tanned using salt, limestone and locally made vegetable-based dyes. The sandals must also be hammered, pierced, stitched and braided by hand, and they can only be produced in designated districts across Maharashtra and Karnataka.
These guidelines are a byproduct of geographical-indication certification — a legal designation governments grant to products tied to a specific place of origin. Once a GI is registered, its name can be protected through domestic laws and, in some cases, international agreements, limiting who can use it. GI registrations have surged in recent years, in some cases becoming a major success story. The origins of Champagne, Tequila and Darjeeling tea are widely recognized in part because GI certifications tied their identities to their geographic roots.
Over the past few years, however, countries have increasingly applied GI tags to cultural products beyond food. Yet not every cultural tradition fits neatly within geographic boundaries. Many evolve across borders and communities, testing the limits of GI systems, particularly in countries like India. Critics argue the tags can flatten shared histories while doing little to support the people keeping them alive.
Champagne is perhaps the best-known example of a GI-tagged product. Its protections date back to the 19th century, when a treaty was signed to ensure the name referred only to sparkling wine produced in France’s Champagne region. Those protections were strengthened over the following century and reinforced by the European Union’s designation of Champagne as a “Protected Designation of Origin.” That allows its name to be protected in the EU and UK, as well as through international agreements, says Aarushi Shrivastav, an international trade consultant at Flint Global. Decades of court battles over misuse of the term have helped cement its success.
GIs have historically worked best in wine and spirits, Shrivastav says, where products are easier to standardize and consumers place a premium on provenance and authenticity. In December, however, the EU opened registrations to craft and industrial products under a new GI scheme. The European Commission’s hope is that “iconic goods such as Bohemian glass, Limoges porcelain, Solingen knives and Donegal tweed, whose reputation and quality stem from their place of origin,” will gain similar protection. “This protection will safeguard traditional skills, support local jobs and help consumers recognize genuine, high-quality European products [and] preserve cultural identity and curb counterfeits both online and offline,” the Commission said in a press release.
The EU is far from alone. Governments around the world increasingly see GI tags as a way to boost the profile — and price — of local products, from textiles to spices. In Cambodia, for example, the production value of Kampot pepper jumped from $70,000 in 2009 to $1 million in 2019 after it received GI certification and was registered internationally by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a UN agency focused on IP protection. Enforcement, however, remains complex: The US also protects geographical indications, but largely through trademark law rather than a dedicated GI system, a difference that has fueled disputes with the EU over products such as cheese and wine.
The growing commercial appeal of GI protections has fueled a surge in registrations worldwide, particularly in India.
Since India’s first GI certification in 2004 for Darjeeling tea, the country has granted more than 600 GI tags. Nearly half cover handicrafts, while about a third apply to agricultural products including spices, medicinal and aromatic crops and fruit. The trend reflects growing interest in IP protection, rural branding and export promotion, according to Manjusha R.S., a GI and intellectual property researcher at Kerala Agricultural University.
In 2025, Indian Minister of Commerce Piyush Goyal set a target of “10,000 GI tags by 2030,” as part of an effort to strengthen the country’s intellectual property ecosystem and combat counterfeiting. Counterfeit goods accounted for roughly $467 billion in global trade in 2021, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, with clothing, footwear and leather goods among the leading categories. While comparable India-specific trade data are not available, a 2025 report by the country’s anti-counterfeiting association estimated that counterfeit products account for about 30% of India’s market in several major sectors, including apparel, electronics and pharmaceuticals.
India’s enthusiasm for GIs is rooted in one of its best-known exports: Basmati rice. In 1985, US company RiceTec said it had developed a new aromatic rice variety by crossbreeding Basmati with other strains. By 1997, it had secured patents covering its rice lines and breeding methods. India challenged the claims, arguing the “American Basmati” was identical to Indian Basmati. The dispute became a landmark case in India’s push to protect products tied to place and origin; the country secured GI certification for Basmati in 2015.
Basmati, however, is claimed by both India and Pakistan, which were once part of a single territory under British rule. Because the rice has been cultivated in both countries for centuries, drawing cultural or geographic boundaries around it is difficult. In recent years, the two countries have sparred over who has the right to market rice internationally as “Basmati.”
GIs don’t always capture these shared histories, cautions food and culture anthropologist Pearl Sandhu. “GIs don’t ‘preserve culture’ in any active sense, and they definitely don’t prevent cultural borrowing or appropriation,” she explains. With heritage crafts in a country like India, artisans have been mobile for centuries. For Sandhu, the problem lies in imposing rigid global borders on inherently fluid traditions. “Our populations are fluid, and so are our crafts and food systems,” she says. “They are rarely tied to one fixed city or origin.”
Sandhu points to meenakari, an enamel art form that originated in Iran before spreading across South Asia through cities including Lahore, Lucknow, Jaipur and Varanasi. In 2015, a year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi was elected from the Varanasi constituency, India granted gulabi (pink) meenakari a GI certification, despite the craft’s meandering history.
Oral learning traditions across South Asia — combined with limited written records in many craft communities — can make it difficult to establish a fixed “proof” of origin, Sandhu says. “How do you assign [a] craft or product to one place or one group of artisans?”
The challenge is also playing out elsewhere in South Asia. The Tangail saree — a delicate cotton and silk weave with intricate patterns, named after Bangladesh’s Tangail region — is claimed by both Bangladesh and India. In 2024, India registered “Tangail Saree of Bengal” as a GI, arguing the craft had been shaped by migration and Partition-era movement across borders. The move drew criticism in Bangladesh, where the weave is also considered part of its cultural heritage.
Manjusha R. S. at Kerala Agricultural University believes GI certifications in India could be more effective if the application process were simplified and artisans and cottage industries had greater awareness of their impact. “GI tags have potential economic and cultural value, because they help establish authenticity, preserve traditional knowledge and improve market recognition,” she says, adding that their impact in India so far has been uneven.
Kolhapuris reveal the gap between recognition and reality. Although the Prada controversy briefly pushed the design into the global spotlight, artisans say its 2019 GI certification has done little to improve conditions on the ground.
Ramesh Jhadav, 60, an artisan who’s been making Kolhapuris for 35 years, doesn’t see the craft surviving, because the designation hasn’t translated into renewed interest from younger generations. “My 32-year-old son works in a shop selling Kolhapuris, but he refuses to [learn] how to make them,” he says. “My children don’t see this work as valuable.”
Satpute, the leather artisan from Kolhapur, says the wider ecosystem is also under strain as leather tanneries close and younger generations leave the trade. “If tanned leather vanishes, authentic Kolhapuris vanish,” he says.
The Prada spat produced at least one tangible outcome. This April, the brand announced a partnership with local artisans in Maharashtra and Karnataka to produce an Indian-made sandal “inspired” by the Kolhapuri and priced in the US at $995. (Satpute’s Kolhapuri sandals sell for $20 to $50 per pair, though custom commissions that take 10 days to make can cost as much as $500.) In a written statement to Bloomberg, Prada said the sandals are marketed as “inspired by Kolhapuri Chappals” for “legal precision,” and differ from the traditional Kolhapuris in their production methods and materials, including the use of Italian leather.
What’s clear is that GI protections alone cannot guarantee that pieces of history and culture will survive. “The system is only as strong as the producer organization behind it,” says Shrivastav at Flint Global. For a GI to be truly effective, “artisans need to be identified, authorized users need to be registered, standards need to be maintained, and misuse needs constant monitoring.”