Elegance and Erasure: When Globalisation Dilutes Culture into Aesthetic
Somewhere between an airport lounge in Dubai and a vegan café in Hackney, someone is sipping a turmeric latte while wearing a kimono-style wrap dress and tagging it #bohochic. The caption reads “wanderlust.” The background? A mural that looks vaguely Andean, or maybe just inspired by one. Culture, once grounded in ritual and rooted in soil, has become an accessory — curated, clickable, and often entirely out of context.
I’ve seen it all too often. The sari draped over shoulders that have never known Diwali, the Maasai necklace worn with denim shorts at a music festival, the mehndi reduced to a Pinterest tutorial titled “exotic summer vibes.” These symbols, once sacred, now float in a kind of aesthetic purgatory: admired, consumed, stripped of meaning. They become décor for people who’ve never tasted the dust of the roads they were born on.
This isn’t a purist’s tantrum. I like cross-cultural exchange. I love when art travels, when spices mingle, when fabrics tell stories across continents. But there’s a difference between conversation and conquest. Between homage and theft. Between wearing something because it makes you feel beautiful, and wearing it because it makes you feel interesting.
Globalisation didn’t invent appropriation, but it certainly put it on steroids. In a world where everything is shareable, shoppable, and ship-ready, the line between appreciation and aesthetic colonisation gets thinner by the day. We’re living in an era where heritage is content, where identity is branding, and where beauty, when untethered from context, begins to rot under the weight of its own erasure.
The Silk Road to Nowhere
Once upon a time, the Silk Road was more than just a collection of dusty paths — it was the artery of the ancient world, a web of exchange, not just of goods, but of ideas, art, and stories. But as we zoom in on the present day, that same idea of “exchange” feels increasingly one-sided. A delicate sari, once woven by hand in the bustling markets of Jaipur, now exists in the same world as a glossy, mass-produced version draped across the shoulders of a high-street model. A Tibetan prayer flag, fluttering in the Himalayas, becomes an Instagram backdrop, emptied of its spiritual weight, repurposed for the lens. What happened to cultural exchange when it mutated into something closer to cultural extraction?
Once, silk was not simply a fabric; it was the very fabric of connection. The ancient world, bathed in the glow of the Silk Road, was full of people giving and receiving, from the porcelain artisans of China to the spice merchants of India. The goods were traded with a kind of reverence, each piece holding a story, a journey. To wear silk was to honour centuries of craft, to carry with you a history that reached across oceans, across empires. But somewhere along the way, the story shifted from one of reverence to one of convenience. The marketplace expanded, but not in ways that could have foreseen the globalisation that would follow. We’re left now with an ironic contrast: mass-produced versions of ancient legacies, packaged as ‘authentic’ or ‘exotic’ but rendered hollow, sold not on the value of their craftsmanship but on the value of their story — a story that has been retold, re-imagined, and often, entirely disrespected.
In this world, cultural symbols no longer belong to the cultures from which they spring. They are merchandise: commodities that travel well, that look good in photographs, that tick boxes on a brand’s diversity checklist. Just as silk — once-precious, laboriously cultivated, can be replicated in synthetic fibres and churned out in factories, so too can cultural identity be replicated in the glossy pages of a fashion magazine. But what happens when we no longer have the original context? When the sari, stripped of its function and its story, becomes the perfect festival outfit, and the kimono, once an embodiment of quiet grace, is transformed into something to be picked up off a sale rack for a fleeting Instagram post?
Is it cultural appropriation if we don’t know what we’re appropriating? It’s easy to say yes, of course, but the line between appreciation and appropriation is not always clear. Perhaps it’s because we’ve forgotten what it means to truly exchange. In the age of Instagram, we skim the surface of culture, dipping in and out, as though the complexities of identity and heritage can be contained in a snapshot. A perfect, filtered snapshot, mind you, because who wants a messy history when you can have the aesthetics without the struggle? The look without the legacy.
This isn’t simply a case of high street brands ripping off designers — though that, too, is a tired, repeated cycle. What’s at stake here is much deeper. It’s the theft of context, the stripping away of the meaning behind the design. It’s the simplification of centuries-old practices into digestible soundbites: how can we possibly understand the painstaking hours of hand-weaving if we only see it as ‘boho chic’? How do we come to understand the significance of a dress from the Maasai if all we know of it is that it ‘looks cool with sandals’? This is cultural extraction at its most insidious: the loss of depth in exchange for the packaging of culture, made palatable for those who are uninterested in the intricate, the sacred, or the difficult.
The irony, of course, is that it’s in the simplification of culture that it loses its power. When something is reduced to aesthetic appeal alone, it loses its capacity to speak to us, to challenge us, to confront us with the uncomfortable truths it once held. In the end, it’s not the sari or the kimono that has changed, but us. We’ve made culture into something that serves us, something to be consumed rather than something to be learned from. And as we continue to buy these symbols, wear these stories, and hang them on our walls, we’ve forgotten that the road to true connection is not through ownership, but through understanding.
Cultural exchange once meant a mutual sharing of knowledge, a crossing of boundaries in both directions. But in our globalised world, that exchange has become uneven, tilted heavily towards extraction. What we wear and what we consume is a reflection of this: the “Silk Road” is no longer about connection, but about consumption. And when we strip away the richness of cultural symbols and distill them into Instagram posts, we are left with a road that doesn’t lead anywhere, except to a market where the only thing exchanged is the illusion of access.
In the end, this is the ultimate irony of our modern-day Silk Road: it’s not about sharing the treasures we’ve discovered; it’s about what we can sell. And in that selling, we’ve forgotten that the greatest gift of culture is not the surface-level allure, but the depth beneath it. Until we remember that, the road to true cultural exchange will continue to lead us nowhere.
Aesthetic Colonialism: When Beauty Becomes a Tool of Soft Erasure
Colonialism doesn’t always wear a uniform. It doesn’t always march under a flag or blaze across maps drawn in ink and blood. In the 21st century, colonialism is softer, more insidious, and wrapped in the fabric of a thousand Instagram influencers’ perfectly curated lives. It hides behind hashtags and filters, often cloaked in the illusion of “sharing,” “appreciation,” or “empowerment.” The new empire is no longer built on territories and gold; it’s built on imagery, aesthetics, and cultural appropriation — the extraction of beauty without context, the commodification of identity without respect.
What’s more, this empire doesn’t come with the brute force of historical conquest. It doesn’t need armies or treaties. Instead, it relies on the quiet power of consumption, feeding off cultural symbols until they are drained of meaning, worn like a trendy new jacket for a season before being discarded for the next big thing. The new empire isn’t borders and flags, but hashtags and fabrics, trend cycles and Instagram captions. It’s a seamless, invisible invasion that operates under the guise of “celebration”, yet leaves behind a ghost of the culture it once borrowed, diluted, and distorted.
The sari, a quintessential garment of South Asia, is worn by millions of women in ways that express centuries of history and regional uniqueness. Now, imagine that same sari, worn by a model in an editorial shoot for a luxury brand with no connection to the culture that birthed it. The sari has lost its purpose. It is no longer a symbol of tradition, a garment worn by a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a daughter. It has been reduced to aesthetic value, appropriated by a market that doesn’t see the history woven into every stitch. And what does this mean for the people who wear it as part of their heritage, whose daily lives are informed by the nuances and rituals of their culture? The sari, once rich with meaning, becomes a mere costume, an accessory to adorn the body in pursuit of an idealised, foreign narrative.
In the realm of aesthetics, colonialism takes root subtly. It doesn’t demand obedience; it merely suggests that we, the global “consumers,” should desire what others have. Not for their soul, but for their allure. What we have now is a world where cultural symbols are stripped of their essence and repurposed for a different cause: one that thrives on creating a universalised, commodified beauty. The Maasai beadwork, traditionally a complex expression of status, age, and tribe, becomes little more than a cute accessory worn by Western celebrities, often at music festivals where the meaning behind the beads is nowhere in sight. This is not admiration or respect; it’s appropriation — the act of taking something that is not yours and turning it into something that serves you.
Aesthetic colonialism is particularly potent in the world of fashion and social media. A hashtag #BohoChic suddenly transforms an entire culture’s aesthetic into an easily digestible, marketable image. In this new empire, beauty has become the currency. However, its value is extracted not through craftsmanship, not through the shared experience of the people who created it, but by the value it can generate on the market. The West, or rather the “global North,” becomes the epicentre of cultural commodification, where non-Western aesthetics are borrowed, repackaged, and sold as “exotic”. And in doing so, erase the layers of meaning that come with those symbols.
In 2018, for example, the fashion industry was worth $2.5 trillion, according to the McKinsey Global Fashion Index. A significant portion of that market is driven by “ethnic chic” trends, fashion that borrows from non-Western cultures without acknowledgment or respect. These trends, which often appear on the runways of global fashion weeks, shape the aesthetics of mainstream culture. But this isn’t a reciprocal relationship. Non-Western cultures rarely see a return for their contributions to global style. In fact, when iconic symbols from African, Asian, and Indigenous cultures are worn without acknowledgment, it often leads to a kind of erasure, where the cultures themselves are left to fend for themselves in a marketplace that is indifferent to their stories. In this way, aesthetic colonialism doesn’t just take the beauty — it also takes the credit, the context, and the culture itself.
Perhaps the cruelest thing about aesthetic colonialism is the way it positions itself as harmless. It is not the visible violence of the past, but a quiet, pervasive erasure that feeds on the very things that make a culture unique. It’s the casual racism that suggests a certain fashion trend is ‘cool,’ without understanding or even acknowledging the centuries of oppression that led to the creation of that trend. It’s the Instagram post where the words “Namaste” are used as a hashtag, completely devoid of the centuries-old spiritual meaning they carry. It’s the fashion house that profits from designs inspired by African prints without compensating or crediting African designers. And it’s the constant erosion of these cultures, which are represented not by people, but by stylised images and clichéd aesthetics, often entirely divorced from the lives of those who live them.
To be sure, cultural exchange can be a beautiful thing, a two-way dialogue where both cultures grow, learn, and enrich each other. However, what we are dealing with today is far from that ideal. This is cultural theft dressed in the garments of “appreciation.” It is the commodification of beauty that ignores the complexities of identity, and in doing so, erases the very thing that made the culture beautiful to begin with. What’s left are hollow images, shiny and appealing on the surface, but utterly lacking in meaning.
The question that we must ask ourselves is: What price are we willing to pay for beauty? When we steal aesthetics without understanding the culture behind them, we create a world where beauty becomes a tool of erasure rather than a celebration. A world where cultures are reduced to costumes, and history is distilled into hashtags. The new empire doesn’t conquer with weapons, but with the irresistible allure of imagery — and in that imagery, we lose something far more valuable than we realise: the stories behind the symbols, the depth behind the beauty, and the people whose lives were once woven into every thread.
Sacred as Spectacle
There’s something eerie about watching the sacred become a spectacle, like finding a prayer repackaged as a Pinterest mood board, or seeing ritual turned into retail. In the modern hunger for “aesthetic,” the world’s oldest symbols have become visual shorthand for “spiritual vibes,” filtered and framed and flattened. Bindis, once pressed onto foreheads with reverence, now sparkle in festival line-ups between glitter and body paint. Henna, a ceremonial art with centuries of intimacy, is offered up as a fun activity next to the margarita stand. Culture, once something you lived, is now something you accessorise.
This isn’t a lament for purity — cultures evolve, change, trade, bleed into one another. That’s always been true. But what we’re watching now feels less like evolution and more like erosion. The sacred isn’t just being borrowed; it’s being hollowed out and monetised. What remains is surface: the symbol without its soul.
In many South Asian traditions, the bindi is not just a dot, it marks the ajna chakra, the spiritual eye. It is ritual, identity, protection. Worn by married women, by dancers, by children on holy days. There’s something grounding about the quiet act of pressing it into place, like speaking without words. But now it flickers on music videos, its context gone, tacked onto foreheads like rhinestones. It’s not worn to honour anything. It’s worn to look like you honour something — to feel exotic, to suggest enlightenment with a £3 stick-on pack from Camden Market. Enlightenment, apparently, now comes with adhesive.
Henna, too, has drifted. Once drawn in elaborate patterns the night before a wedding, surrounded by aunties gossiping and girls laughing, traditionally an act of bonding, of blessing, of holding tradition in your very skin, now brushed onto hands in boutique salons by people who don’t know what it means when your name is hidden in the pattern. What used to be a rite is now an “add-on” to your spa package. Mehndi becomes Malibu. The significance melts in chlorine.
The issue isn’t sharing. It’s extraction. It’s the way meaning is discarded while the motif is kept. It’s the dissonance of watching someone wear a bindi at a party, while the girl who wore one to school was once told it was “weird” or “too much.” It’s when the same symbols that marked you as foreign or backward are suddenly rebranded as edgy, or cool, once they’ve been divorced from you. When your culture is acceptable only when it’s no longer yours.
This isn’t about gatekeeping. It’s about grief. About how ceremony becomes content. There’s a slow ache in watching something that once made your grandmother cry, now used to sell beachwear. It feels like losing a language — the words still spoken, but emptied of meaning. A sacred act becomes a weekend activity, reduced to a backdrop for a boomerang video, or a line in a lifestyle blog about “Eastern influences.”
Even the language around it starts to change. Ritual becomes “trend.” Cultural elements are “curated,” “infused,” “reimagined.” The coloniser’s vocabulary for control, now in the mouths of magazine editors and influencers. Ceremony, once a site of collective memory, becomes raw material for an aesthetic that owes no debt.
And maybe worst of all, there’s the smiling politeness expected of the people these traditions actually belong to. Say something and you’re “overreacting.” “It’s just fashion.” “It’s appreciation.” “It’s a compliment.” But is it really a compliment if it comes without comprehension? If it’s taken, worn, and profited from, with no effort to understand what it means to us — the joy, the context, the rules, the pain? Appreciation without proximity becomes abstraction. You don’t have to love us. Just don’t love what we make while pretending we don’t exist.
Of course, no one owns a symbol outright. But the sacred is sacred because it is held in common, passed through generations with care, with ceremony, with story. When that’s stripped away, you don’t get global harmony, you get beautiful ruins.
And so the question remains: what happens to a culture when its rituals are borrowed like costumes? When the things you once knelt before now dangle from earlobes at brunch? Perhaps nothing dramatic. No riots. No headlines. Just a quiet forgetting. A soft deletion of meaning. The kind of loss that fades. Like henna washed off too soon. Like a bindi left behind on a hotel bathroom mirror, stuck to nothing.
Museum Chic: The Price of Being Preserved
There’s a particular kind of violence that doesn’t draw blood. it polishes. It encases. It lights you just right. This is the quiet brutality of being turned into an artefact: admired, respected, completely silenced. You are no longer a person or a people, you are “heritage.” You are “inspiration.” You are a museum, and someone else owns the gift shop.
The age of empire is not over; it’s just better dressed. It now comes in the form of heritage-inspired capsule collections, museum exhibits sponsored by fashion houses, and restaurants where your grandmother’s food is served on £45 crockery with a ‘twist.’ Cultures that were once deemed primitive or unrefined are now the aesthetic darlings of creative directors and Michelin-starred chefs. But they are not invited to the table, only their recipes are.
Let’s call it what it is: colonialism with better lighting. The museumification of culture embalms. A living tradition is taken, vacuum-sealed in respectability, and placed behind glass, or worse, repackaged for the runway. Once it is static, it is safe. Once it cannot speak back, it can be sold.
You’ve likely seen it before. A luxury label ‘reimagining’ tribal patterns with a £3,000 price tag. A major gallery exhibiting “indigenous crafts” with not a single indigenous voice in the room. A music festival offering workshops on ancestral dance taught by a white yoga instructor named Skye. We’re told it’s appreciation. It looks suspiciously like a resale.
There is a strange irony here. The same cultures once deemed too loud, too colourful, too uncivilised — are now praised for their vibrancy and “authenticity,” but only once filtered through the right lens. It’s not the sari, it’s how you wear it. Not the chant, but how it sounds with synth. The message is clear: your culture is beautiful, just not when you do it.
And so heritage becomes something to be mined. Something to be harvested for logos, collections, and moodboards. Your rituals are content now. Your language is an aesthetic. Your struggles are a rustic charm. The parts of you that survived colonisation are now styled as postmodern whimsy, and sold back to you at a markup you can’t afford.
Even museums, once considered dusty archives, have leaned into the aesthetic economy. They are curated Instagram playgrounds now. Heritage, but make it photogenic. “Experience” the exhibit. “Shop the look.” The tragedy of cultural loss now comes with a tote bag. And still, the voices of the cultures on display are mostly silent. Or, more cruelly, required to perform — a one-night panel, a cultural ambassador, flown in for flavour. A human spice rack.
The danger of museum chic isn’t just erasure. It’s replacement. When your culture is seen only through the curated eye of outsiders, their version becomes the official one. Their sari becomes the fashion. Their cookbook becomes the bestseller. Their podcast becomes the voice. You are no longer consulted. You are cited, and even that is rare.
To be preserved, sometimes, is to be erased in high definition.
There is also a sadness in how we, the descendants of these cultures, begin to internalise this lens. We visit exhibitions of “our” heritage like tourists. We wear our traditions once a year, if at all. We begin to crave the version of ourselves that others find palatable — the clean lines, the muted tones, the ‘minimalist’ reinterpretations. We forget that culture is not a fixed object. It is movement. It is dance. It is contradiction and colour and chaos. It is alive. Until someone decides it’s more profitable dead.
The solution, if there is one, is not to hide culture away in guilt or barbed wire. It is to let it breathe again. To tell our own stories, with full noise and no apologies. To reject the idea that heritage needs a white wall and a spotlight to be worthy. To make museums uncomfortable again.
Because true culture — the kind that lives, sweats, weeps, jokes in inappropriate moments, was never meant to be curated. It was meant to be carried. Mispronounced by your niece. Passed down, badly and beautifully. Sung off-key at weddings. Spilled in kitchen mishaps. Fought over, laughed over, worn daily until it tears. That is culture. Not the mannequin, but the mess.
So next time someone says they “love your heritage,” ask them which part they mean. The embroidery, or the exile? The spice, or the story? The beauty, or the burden?
Because if they only want the first, then what they really love isn’t you — it’s the costume.
Appropriation with Good Lighting: Pretty Faces, Empty Contexts
Somewhere between the ring light and the repost, something sacred is lost. Not stolen in the dramatic heist sense, but borrowed with a smile, filtered to perfection, and returned with the tags still on. Cultural appropriation, in its 2020s form, is not the brute force of empire, but a more insidious charm. It flatters. It praises. It captions things “inspired by,” and somehow we’re meant to say thank you.
Influencer culture, with its smoothie bowls and curated suffering, has mastered the art of contextless beauty. It can post a video of a white woman with box braids and call it “summery.” It can wear a sari for a wedding and call it “a dream.” It can mouth along to songs in languages it doesn’t speak, dance routines it doesn’t understand, and end with a wink. Somewhere in that gap, between aesthetic consumption and cultural understanding, is a violence that’s difficult to name because it’s dressed so nicely.
The thing about appropriation today is that it’s rarely malicious. That’s what makes it so effective. Performative diversity thrives on plausible deniability. A campaign might cast a Black trans model, a hijabi skateboarder, and an ambiguous racially fluid person with perfect cheekbones — and still sell you the same overpriced cardigan, made by the same underpaid workers, funded by the same equity firm. It’s not diversity; it’s optics. A costume change. Inclusion as accessory.
There’s a term that floats around sometimes: “ethnic glamour.” Usually used to describe a certain “je ne sais quoi” borrowed from the Global South, like the smoky eye of a Bollywood actress, the earth-toned elegance of a Moroccan courtyard, the spiritual chic of Tibetan prayer flags hanging just out of frame. These are not references, they’re props. You don’t need to know where something comes from, or who paid the price for it to become fashionable. You just need the lighting right, the hashtag clever, the caption vaguely grateful. “Honoured to wear this beautiful garment” becomes a substitute for asking what that garment means — to whom, and at what cost.
And still, people ask: isn’t imitation a form of flattery? Yes. But only if the thing being imitated is not still under threat. Only if the people who created it are allowed to profit from it too. Otherwise, it’s not flattery. It’s erasure by elevation. Like clapping over someone while they’re trying to speak.
Social media has made culture fast food — immediate, aesthetic, and ultimately disposable. One week, it’s kimchi. The next, it’s Fulani braids. Everything is trend; nothing is context. And while people scroll through this globalised buffet of beauty, the actual cultures behind the content are still fighting visa restrictions, racist policies, or simply the boredom of being exotic until you’re inconvenient.
It’s not about gatekeeping. No one wants to build fences around beauty. It’s about responsibility. About knowing the difference between learning and looting. When an influencer travels to Bali and calls the temple “such a vibe,” something ancient is being quietly flattened into wallpaper. Spiritual traditions become set dressing. People become part of the furniture. Culture becomes an aesthetic rather than a relationship — something worn, not something lived.
Praise without understanding is not kindness; it’s consumption. It doesn’t elevate the culture, it elevates the person borrowing from it. It’s easy to mistake applause for permission. It’s even easier when the applause comes with brand deals and “allyship” credentials. Because that’s what this really is — not a celebration of difference, but a performance of proximity. Close enough to be interesting, distant enough to remain in control.
And so, we return to the ring light. The white backdrop. The hand delicately posed on a fabric someone else’s grandmother dyed by hand. A caption filled with heart emojis and no history. And beneath it all, the quiet churn of a machine that rewards the aesthetic, punishes the authentic, and calls it progress.
There’s a way to borrow that isn’t theft. It involves listening. Credit. Payment. Decentring oneself. But none of that photographs particularly well.
So we keep scrolling — past the hijabi yoga girl, the indigenous beadwork on runways, the Chinese calligraphy on someone’s ribcage.
All of it beautiful.
All of it borrowed.
All of it lit perfectly, just enough to obscure what we’ve chosen not to see.
What the Market Can’t Translate: Language, Grief, and the Un-Googleable Soul of Culture
There are things the market is fluent in — logos, trends, scarcity. It knows how to auction identity, how to price nostalgia, how to brand a memory until it becomes shelf-ready. But some things, thank god, remain untranslatable. Not because they are too obscure, but because they refuse to flatten. Grief, for instance. Or the sound of a mother scolding you in a language no algorithm has quite figured out. Or the way a ritual feels when it’s done properly — not for a camera, not for a tourist, not for an app.
Capitalism has many dialects, and it speaks them all fluently. But it struggles with reverence. It does not know what to do with things that cannot be scaled or tagged. There’s no influencer campaign for mourning. No “gifted” disclosure when your grandmother dies. And so, culture that centres the unsellable — the pause, the silence, the deeply particular, is often treated as decorative. Interesting. Instagrammable. But somehow not real.
There’s a word in Tagalog: gigil. It means the kind of overwhelming affection that makes you want to squeeze someone, almost painfully. It doesn’t quite map to English. Try explaining ubuntu, the Southern African philosophy of shared humanity, to someone who thinks personal success is measured by LinkedIn endorsements. Or duende, the Spanish concept of soulful creative struggle, to a VC pitching an AI startup with poetry prompts. It’s not that translation is impossible. It’s just that some meanings wilt when plucked.
Language is one frontier where the market keeps trying and keeps failing. It’s why voiceover dubs of Bollywood films never quite capture the sarcasm. Why Google Translate will always butcher idioms. Why someone’s accent still carries the ghost of a place, even when every other marker has been sanded down to corporate neutrality. Language holds memory like a bruise — quietly, enduringly, beneath the surface. And you can’t monetise that. You can borrow the sound, the rhythm, even the typography. But not the weight.
This is why grief unsettles capitalism so profoundly. It does not follow a schedule. It cannot be made “productive.” It lingers, messily, inconveniently. In many cultures, mourning is not a private affair but a structured, communal ritual. There are rules, not because tradition is uptight, but because the soul needs scaffolding. Grief without ritual is just floating pain. But when companies “respect your loss” with a templated email or a discount code, it becomes clear: they don’t know how to sit in the dark with you. Only how to light it for content.
Ritual, like language and grief, resists the swipe. It’s meant to be slow, deliberate, often boring. That’s the point. The repetition creates space for presence. The body knows what to do even when the heart falters. Whether it’s lighting incense, reciting prayer, or tying fabric around a tree, ritual anchors us to something older than ourselves. It says: this is how we endure. Not by escaping, but by staying with it.
Yet modern culture loves to remix the sacred into aesthetic. Meditation becomes an app. Yoga becomes a body type. A Japanese tea ceremony becomes “matcha vibes.” And with each soft-focus edit, the original meaning thins. We consume without digesting. We wear the symbols without understanding what they once kept sacred. It’s not theft in the traditional sense. It’s something more subtle. A gentle bleaching. A quiet forgetting.
And perhaps the most tragic thing is that we’re encouraged to find this charming. To view it as global connection. But not all blending is beauty. Sometimes it’s erosion. There is a difference between appreciating a meal and franchising it. Between learning a language and mining it for quotes. Between witnessing a ritual and turning it into a content strategy.
Culture isn’t content. It’s not made for your mood board. It doesn’t owe you clarity, or convenience. It is, at its core, a way of carrying life — through storm, through joy, through the ordinary Tuesday where everything hurts for no reason. It is not always pretty. But it is always true.
So no, the market cannot translate everything. It cannot trademark sorrow. It cannot own devotion. It cannot algorithmically predict the way your cousin laughs when your uncle mispronounces an English word on purpose. And thank god for that.
Let there be corners of ourselves that remain unmapped. Let there be languages that never trend. Let there be grief that stays sacred. Not everything should be rendered market-ready. Some things must remain heavy. Complicated. Human.
Untranslated.
The Refusal to Perform: Rituals of Resistance in a World That Orientalises
There is power in not explaining yourself. In lighting a candle not for the ambience, but because your grandmother said it wards off the bad luck your mother’s side carries. In praying in a language you barely speak, not because it looks beautiful stitched on a tapestry, but because it’s how the women before you whispered strength into dark corners. These small, defiant acts carried out away from hashtags and hover-text, are more than tradition. They’re resistance. Especially in a world that keeps asking you to translate.
Edward Said warned us. Orientalism, he wrote, wasn’t just about looking at the East through a Western lens. It was about fixing it — freezing it into postcard stillness, stripping it of context, making it digestible. It turned the richly complex into the softly exotic. The mosque became an aesthetic; the prayer, a soundtrack. Culture was not understood, it was consumed. Always with good lighting. Always with a grin of polite interest.
And so, we learned to perform. To serve watered-down versions of ourselves that would go down easy. Food that didn’t smell “too much.” Clothes that could be called “inspired.” Accents flattened for the job interview. Faith compartmentalised for the white friend. The marketplace doesn’t want your wholeness; it wants your silhouette. A shadow it can sell.
But the rituals? The real ones? They don’t translate well. They linger too long. They don’t make sense in bullet points. They ask you to close your eyes, not pose. And therein lies their power. To light incense without explaining why. To fast when the world is eating. To sing the old songs off-key in your living room because someone has to remember. These are acts of cultural maintenance. Of love. Of quiet rebellion.
In a global economy that feeds on visibility, invisibility can be protection. That you pray in your room and not on your feed isn’t a shame, it’s strategy. That the real story behind the festival isn’t in the caption isn’t a failure, it’s freedom. Not everything sacred needs to be legible to the world. Not everything true needs to be translated for trend. Some of our power is in what we withhold.
It’s easy to think that resistance has to be loud. Placards. Hashtags. Marches. But sometimes, it’s a grandmother refusing to throw out a broken god-statue because that’s where the power lives. It’s saying your real name even when people butcher it… and saying it again. It’s wearing the red thread on your wrist, not for aesthetics, but because you were told it protects. And whether or not it does is beside the point. It protects because you believe it does. That is reason enough.
This kind of resistance confuses the Orientalist gaze. It won’t pose. It won’t flatten. It insists on meaning over marketability. On depth over decoration. It holds its own logic — sometimes contradictory, sometimes unclear, always layered. And in that refusal to simplify, it stays intact.
Rituals are not relics. They’re not props for a photoshoot. They are living acts, shaped by memory and muscle. To kneel, to chant, to cook the same dish the same way every New Year even when you live in a flat where the windows don’t open, that is not nostalgia. That is strategy. Continuity. A way of saying: I am still here, even if you don’t see me.
In an era where everything is curated and performed, sincerity becomes radical. Not the aesthetic of sincerity, but the real thing. The kind that doesn’t need to be watched to be meaningful. The kind that doesn’t care if it trends.
So light the candle. Say the prayer. Tie the thread. Not for them. Not for clicks. But for yourself. For the ones who came before you. For the ones still watching, even if you’ve forgotten how to see them.
Let the ritual remain unfiltered.
Let it be confusing to them.
Let it be yours.
Elegance, but Make It Ethical
Can fashion ever truly honour its sources?
What does real appreciation look like, and is it ever enough?
The most difficult truth that fashion seems determined to skirt is that authenticity, when it comes to cultural appropriation, can never be a matter of passing off borrowed ideas as original. True appreciation means acknowledging the history and struggle behind every intricate stitch, bead, and pattern. It’s recognising that each design carries a story, one woven into the fabric of generations, and is not simply a fabric to be cut, sold, and worn without consequence. The very act of wearing a sari or a Maasai beaded necklace should come with the weight of that history — the struggles, triumphs, and centuries-old traditions that brought these objects into existence. Yet, too often, we wear these garments as badges of novelty, detached from their origins, leaving the source culture ghosted by our consumption.
So, can fashion ever truly honour its sources? The question is difficult, because fashion thrives on the ability to reinvent, to co-opt, and to reframe. But the moment that appropriation becomes a mere aesthetic or trend, it leaves behind the true value of culture. True appreciation requires not only respect but recognition. Not only honouring the craftsmanship but the people behind it, without reducing their history to a ‘look’ or a ‘vibe’ for your Insta feed.
Real appreciation would mean not just wearing but learning, not just sharing but paying. It would be the opposite of trend-jumping or a quick dive into a cultural costume; it would be rooted in a long, sustainable connection. It would require that we, the consumers, hold ourselves accountable for the stories we choose to tell through the clothes we wear. There is a difference between borrowing and stealing, between paying homage and appropriating. But that line is sometimes thin, especially when market forces begin to turn culture into currency.
Is it ever enough? Perhaps not, at least not in the way that the fashion industry functions now. The beauty of culture cannot be boiled down to an Instagram post or sold in limited edition collections. But the industry can make strides. In a world of fast fashion and fleeting trends, perhaps the answer lies in slowing down, in honouring craftsmanship and story, in paying real tribute to the cultures from which we draw our ‘inspiration.’ Maybe it’s not about creating new ethical systems that serve us and our consumer desires but about reshaping our relationships to fashion entirely — moving from a transactional model to one built on respect, exchange, and mutual understanding.
True elegance, it seems, is more than skin-deep. It’s about building something meaningful and lasting, not just on the outside, but in the way we respect and value the cultures that have shaped the designs we love. Whether fashion can achieve this, however, depends on whether we, as both creators and consumers, are willing to look beyond the surface and truly listen to what is being offered, not just taken.
S xoxo
Written in Miami, Florida
3rd May 2025