Why isn’t South Asian good enough?

As South Asian fashion trends online, so do conversations about representation, rebranding and exploitation.

(Image by Yan Krukau via Pexels)

What started as a curious TikTok video analyzing a fashion style quickly sparked a wide-ranging conversation about the commodification of South Asian culture. 

This all began after the fashion brand Bipty posted a TikTok video dissecting a scarf style, calling it European and almost Scandinavian. The video received some criticism from the South Asian community and revealed a much deeper conversation about cultural commodification and exploitation.  

South Asian TikTok creator “Forgottengirl505” engages in this discourse online and says this issue goes far deeper than just fashion. She says the dupatta is a symbol of resistance among South Asian women and has a deep history that must be recognized. From the days of British colonialism, some Indian women wore only Khadi dupattas, a handspun Indian fabric, as a form of resistance against British rule.

The dupatta was also used in protest in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1984, when members of the Women's Action Forum burned their dupattas as a form of protest against the increasing amount of sexual assault against women in the city. She says reducing the dupatta to a “Scandinavian scarf” ignores the history of social and political struggles it represents.

Other South Asian women share this criticism. Zoya Adnan, a Pakistani student at Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU), says that her culture is only digestible to the public when it's called something it's not. Adnan says she once saw an ad for what appeared to be a Punjabi jutti—a traditional decorative shoe—that was labelled differently online.

“I saw on either Poshmark or Depop, it was a jutti, but it was marked as Italian beaded shoes,” she says. She says she doesn’t mind when her culture is appreciated, but it hurts when it must first be repurposed into something European. 

“I think it's one thing to see a cultural product and wanting to wear it,” said Adnan, “but it's a whole other thing, in my opinion, to market it as something else, because why isn't anything South Asian good enough? Why does it need to be called Italian, or Scandinavian, or whatever the hell?”

She says that her community is not benefiting from this exchange. “It's not like these companies are working with Indian retailers or working with South Asian artists, they're not compensating anybody, they’re also calling it something completely different,” she said.

For Adnan, the issue goes past mislabeling and reflects the larger pattern of disrespect and a double standard. She says this affects her so deeply because it reminds her of her childhood. What is now celebrated on white bodies was once the same thing young South Asian girls were made to feel different about. 

“You would show up to school with henna on your hands, and kids ask, ‘what is that? what is that?’ Some of it’s amazement, some of it’s judgement, when you're a kid, you can't tell the difference.”

Mannha Basit, a Pakistani woman studying visual culture and communications at the University of Toronto Mississauga, shares Adnan's concerns. She says influencers and conglomerates refuse to credit the cultures that inspire them. 

She says mainstream fashion brands are taking advantage of South Asian designs. “Like H&M and Winners, they have profited off of South Asian designs, and you can tell it’s South Asian, the prints, the embroidery, the style, H&M and Zara are selling these loose flowy tops that look just like a shalwar kameez.” 

Basit says they won't call it what it is. “Now it's ‘bohemian’ and ‘Scandinavian.’” 

Basit says this commodification is not limited to storefronts. She says similar rebranding has happened with hair. “I remember seeing kids come to school with oil in their hair and they’d braid it, and would get made fun of, now it's the clean girl aesthetic,” Basit said.

Basit noticed the shift in perception when it was South Asian kids versus the trend it has become. “People would be mocked for smelling bad or being dirty, but now it's a part of the clean girl aesthetic to oil your hair and slick it back,” she said.

Basit emphasizes that there is a stark difference between celebrating culture and exploiting it. “People who are a part of that culture and have been practising it for generations have been mocked for it, and haven't profited off of it like this, and now when you take those practices and rebrand it, it's not celebrating the culture, you’re kind of making it your own and not giving credit where it's due.”

Critical Political Geographer and Assistant Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, Ismahan Yusuf, highlights how colonialism is deeply rooted in the ways these traditions become exploited. “It is cultural extraction,” she said. “It's the process by which these dominant European cultures will strip cultural practices from their context, really meaningful ones too, and then will detach them, deracinate them from the communities that originally produced them, nurtured and watered them.”

She points to the cultural extraction of the Indian practice of yoga and how it was perceived before becoming a mainstream Western practice. “Yoga is one of the most egregious ones,” she said. “You go back 20, 30, 40 years and there was such a disdain around these very spiritual localized practices in South Asia.”

Yusuf says it's even deeper than what we are currently seeing—it goes back centuries. “South Asian culture has always been this site of extraction for European powers,” she said. 

She reiterates others' sentiments that there is a difference between cultural appreciation and commodification. “Cultural exchange is when there is an appreciation for it, there is an understanding of the history, there is an effort not to rebrand but to understand that it's not yours, you’ve been gifted this to enjoy, but it's not yours,” she says.

Fashion trends are constantly evolving and changing rapidly, but the cultures that inspire them are everlasting and have rich histories. Members of these communities are asking for better representation and for credit where it's due.