The Prada Sandal IP Controversy
A pair of Kolhapuri chappals for men sells in an Indian market for about ₹200 (2 USD). A near-identical
A pair of Kolhapuri chappals for men sells in an Indian market for about ₹200 (2 USD). A near-identical pair walked the Prada runway in Milan at roughly ₹1.2 lakh (Over 1200 Dollars), around six hundred times the price.
That gap, and the fact that Prada initially said nothing about where the design came from, turned a sandal into one of the most instructive intellectual-property stories in fashion. It is partly a tale about credit and appropriation, which is the part everyone argued about. The more useful part is what it revealed about how badly the law protects traditional craft.
What Are Kolhapuri Chappals?
Kolhapuri chappals are handcrafted leather sandals named after Kolhapur, a town in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. The men’s version is the classic form: an open, slip-on sandal with a flat sole, a braided leather strap across the foot, and a distinctive T-shaped toe loop that hooks around the big toe.
They are made from leather that is vegetable-tanned, or bag-tanned, rather than treated with chemicals, which gives them their characteristic tan colour and long life. A good pair is entirely handmade and can last for years, softening to the shape of the wearer’s foot.
The craft is old. Artisans have been making these sandals since around the 12th century, and the trade has been carried for generations by leatherworking families, many from the Dalit Chamar community, one of the most marginalised groups in Indian society. Roughly 15,000 to 20,000 artisans still make them, mostly in rural workshops with little machinery.
Authentic Kolhapuris are produced in eight districts across two states, four in Maharashtra and four in neighbouring Karnataka. A genuine men’s pair bought directly from an artisan typically costs a few hundred rupees, which is part of why the Prada price tag landed the way it did.
The Prada Runway Moment
When Prada presented its Spring/Summer 2026 menswear collection in Milan, the show included a minimalist braided leather sandal. Within hours, viewers in India recognised it. The braided strap, the toe loop, the flat profile: it was, to most Indian eyes, a Kolhapuri chappal with a designer markup and no mention of India anywhere in the show notes.
The reaction was immediate. Social media filled with side-by-side photos and jokes about the price, one widely shared post reading, “Prada’s selling my dad’s sandals for ₹1.2 lakh.” Artisans and politicians in Maharashtra accused the brand of lifting a centuries-old design without credit, payment, or consultation.
The anger carried an edge sharper than the usual appropriation row, because of who makes these sandals. The human rights group Dalit Voice described the Kolhapuri as a legacy of Dalit craftsmanship and resilience, which reframed the dispute as a wealthy European house profiting from the work of a community that has been economically excluded for centuries.
Why the GI Tag Could Not Stop Prada
Here is the part that should interest anyone who works with intellectual property, because the design was supposed to be protected, and the protection did almost nothing.
In 2019, Kolhapuri chappals were granted a Geographical Indication, or GI, the same class of protection that covers Champagne, Darjeeling tea, and Parmigiano Reggiano. A GI ties a product name to a specific place and certifies that goods sold under that name genuinely come from there. There are now more than 900 authorised users of the Kolhapuri GI in India.
The trouble is what a GI actually protects, which is the name, not the look. The Kolhapuri GI stops a factory in another country from selling its sandals labelled as “Kolhapuri.” It does nothing to stop anyone from making an identical sandal and calling it something else, which is exactly what Prada did. The brand never used the word Kolhapuri; it simply sold the design.
A GI also stops at the border. It is registered and enforced under Indian law, and offers no automatic protection in Italy or anywhere else. As one Indian IP expert put it, the tag leaves artisans exposed to global brands the moment the product crosses an international boundary.
And even within India, the law gives the artisans no right to compensation. Acknowledging the source is treated as an ethical nicety, not a legal duty. This is the loophole that lets a design move from a ₹200 sandal to a luxury runway with nothing owed to the people who created it, and Prada is not the first to use it. British designer Paul Smith once sold footwear plainly inspired by the Peshawari chappal of Pakistan, and Dior has faced near-identical accusations over Indian craft.
A Geographical Indication
For readers outside India, it helps to be precise about what this kind of protection can and cannot do.
A Geographical Indication is collective rather than individual. No single artisan owns it; it belongs to the registered community of producers in the defined region. That collective structure is its strength as heritage recognition and its weakness as a legal weapon, because there is no single rights-holder with the standing and resources to chase a global brand through foreign courts.
It protects authenticity of origin, not creativity of design. That distinction is the whole story here. Patent and copyright protect how something looks or works and can be enforced internationally through treaties. A GI protects only the right to use a name, inside the country that granted it. Traditional craft, passed down over centuries and owned by a community rather than a person, falls straight through the gap between those systems.
The Climbdown the Law Could Not Compel
What happened next is the twist that makes the story worth telling.
Under sustained public pressure, Prada acknowledged the Indian origins of the design through its head of corporate responsibility. Then it went further than acknowledgment. The brand opened talks with Maharashtra trade bodies and committed to an actual collaboration.
Months later, Prada confirmed a limited run of Made in India Kolhapuri-inspired sandals, around 2,000 pairs produced in Maharashtra and Karnataka under agreements with two state-backed artisan corporations, combining local craftsmanship with Italian production. The sandals would sell through 40 Prada stores worldwide and online, alongside a three-year training programme for artisans from the eight traditional districts. The head of one Maharashtra trade body called it a paradigm shift for Indian craftsmanship.
The detail worth noticing is that none of this was required by law. The GI tag could not force Prada to share a rupee. What produced the credit, the collaboration, and the benefit-sharing was not the statute but the viral outrage. Social media did the job the legal system was built for and could not perform.
Craft Has No Owner
The Prada Kolhapuri saga is usually filed under cultural appropriation, but the more lasting lesson is about who the law is built to protect, and who it leaves out.
Every form of intellectual property assumes an owner: a patent has an inventor, a copyright has an author, a trademark has a company. Each protection is a line drawn around a someone, a person or firm with a name, a filing date, and the standing to sue. The whole system is designed to answer one question: who does this belong to?
Traditional craft has no answer to that question. The Kolhapuri belongs to no inventor and no company. It belongs to a community and to nine hundred years, which is precisely the kind of owner the law does not recognise. The Geographical Indication was an attempt to bridge that gap, to protect a somewhere instead of a someone, but it only reaches as far as the name. It guards the word “Kolhapuri” and leaves the sandal itself, the design that took centuries to perfect, free for anyone to take.
That is why a global brand can lift a 900-year-old design and sell it at six hundred times the price without breaking a single rule. There was never an owner the law would defend, only a community it could not see. The artisans were left to enforce with a hashtag what the statute could not, a pattern I have written about in the context of marketing due diligence and cultural blunders.
India is now debating stronger, design-focused protection for its handicrafts. Stripped of jargon, that effort is an attempt to invent something the law has never really had: a form of ownership that can be collective, inherited, and authorless, and still hold up in court. Until it exists, the Kolhapuri chappal remains what it has always been, a beautiful and durable men’s sandal that anyone in the world is free to copy, as long as they remember not to call it by its name.
Sources
Bloomberg: What the Prada-Kolhapuri Sandal Dispute Revealed About Protecting Traditional Craft
NBC News: Prada Seeks to Mend Ties With ‘Made in India’ Sandals
SpicyIP: The Devil Wears Kolhapuri or Prada? Understanding GI Law and Cultural Appropriation
Khurana & Khurana: The Prada-Kolhapuri Chappal Controversy and the IPR Dilemma
IAS Express: Prada’s Kolhapuri Sandals Controversy — Lessons for GI Protection in India
