Elegance and Erasure: When Globalisation Dilutes Culture into Aesthetic
Somewhere in the liminal space between a Dubai airport lounge and a vegan café in Hackney, an individual sips a turmeric latte while adorned in a kimono-style wrap dress, diligently tagging the moment #bohochic. The caption reads, with poetic brevity, “wanderlust.” The backdrop features a mural of vague ethnic inspiration, perhaps Andean, or perhaps simply a graphic designer’s diluted interpretation of ‘global folk art.’ Culture, once a tapestry woven from ritual and deeply rooted in specific soil, has been repurposed as a digital accessory; meticulously curated, endlessly clickable, and almost entirely divorced from its original context.
This is a spectacle I have witnessed with increasing frequency. The elegant drape of a sari flung over shoulders that have never felt the warmth of a Diwali night, the vibrant intricacy of a Maasai necklace paired with denim shorts at a summer music festival, the rich tradition of mehndi reduced to a Pinterest board titled “Exotic Summer Vibes.” These potent symbols, once sacred and storied, now drift in a state of aesthetic purgatory: universally admired, voraciously consumed, yet systematically stripped of their inherent meaning. They become mere décor for an audience that has never tasted the particular dust of the roads where these traditions were born.
Let me be clear; this is not a purist’s tantrum against cultural exchange. I relish the beautiful chaos that occurs when art travels, when spices intermingle across continents, and when fabrics tell hybrid stories. A crucial distinction must be drawn, however, between a genuine conversation and a quiet conquest; between a respectful homage and a form of aesthetic theft. The difference rests in intention: wearing something because it connects you to a feeling of beauty is one thing; wearing it primarily to project an aura of interestingness is quite another.
Globalisation may not have invented cultural appropriation, but it has undoubtedly placed the practice on an aggressive steroid regimen. In our hyper-connected world, where every artifact is instantly shareable, readily shoppable, and available for next-day delivery, the boundary between sincere appreciation and casual aesthetic colonisation wears thinner by the hour. We now inhabit an era where ancestral heritage is repackaged as disposable content, where personal identity is treated as a branding exercise, and where beauty, once untethered from the soil of its origin, begins a slow decay under the suffocating weight of its own erasure.
The Silk Road to Nowhere
Once, the Silk Road constituted more than a mere network of dusty trails; it functioned as the very artery of the ancient world, a sprawling web of exchange that trafficked not only in goods, but in ideas, artistry, and living stories. If we fast-forward to our present moment, this noble concept of “exchange” feels increasingly, and uncomfortably, one-sided. Consider the delicate sari, once woven by hand in the bustling markets of Jaipur, now existing in the same universe as its glossy, mass-produced counterpart draped over the shoulders of a high-street model. Observe the Tibetan prayer flag, fluttering with spiritual intent in the Himalayan wind, repurposed as a colourful Instagram backdrop, emptied of its devotional weight. One must ask: what became of cultural exchange when it quietly mutated into a process more accurately described as cultural extraction?
Historically, silk was never simply a fabric; it represented the very material of connection. The ancient world, illuminated by the routes of the Silk Road, thrived on a dynamic of mutual giving and receiving, from the master porcelain artisans of China to the shrewd spice merchants of India. These goods were traded with a palpable reverence, each piece a vessel for a story, a testament to a long journey. To wear silk was to honour centuries of meticulous craft, to carry with you a history that spanned oceans and empires. Somewhere along the line, however, the narrative shifted from one of reverence to one of sheer convenience. The marketplace expanded beyond any ancient merchant’s imagination, hurtling towards a form of globalisation that privileges speed over substance. We are now left with a deeply ironic contrast: mass-produced facsimiles of ancient legacies, marketed as ‘authentic’ or ‘exotic,’ yet rendered utterly hollow, valued not for their craftsmanship but for the marketability of their story — a story that has been retold, re-imagined, and, all too often, entirely stripped of respect.
In this modern paradigm, cultural symbols are effectively severed from their sources. They become mere merchandise: commodities that photograph well, travel efficiently, and tick boxes on a corporation’s diversity checklist. Just as precious, laboriously cultivated silk can be replicated in synthetic fibres and churned out by the mile, so too can cultural identity be simulated in the glossy pages of a fashion magazine. This invites a troubling question: what remains when the original context is entirely lost? When the sari, divorced from its ceremonial function and rich narrative, becomes the perfect festival outfit, and the kimono, once an embodiment of quiet grace and social code, is transformed into a disposable item plucked from a sale rack for a fleeting social media post.
Is it still cultural appropriation if the appropriators are blissfully unaware of their transgression? The instinctive answer is yes, yet the boundary between appreciation and appropriation is often deliberately blurred. This confusion stems from a collective forgetting of what it means to engage in a genuine exchange. In the age of Instagram, we have become cultural skimmers, dipping in and out of traditions as though the complexities of identity and heritage can be captured in a single, perfectly composed snapshot. A filtered snapshot, naturally, because who has the patience for a messy, complicated history when one can have the pristine aesthetics without the accompanying struggle? The desirable look, without the burdensome legacy.
This phenomenon transcends the tired cycle of high-street brands plagiarising designers. The stakes are considerably higher. This is the theft of context, the systematic stripping away of meaning from design. It is the reduction of centuries-old practices into easily digestible soundbites: how can one possibly comprehend the painstaking hours of hand-weaving when it is labelled merely ‘boho chic’? How does one grasp the profound significance of a Maasai garment if its sole recognised attribute is that it ‘looks cool with sandals’? This represents cultural extraction in its most insidious form: the sacrifice of depth for the sake of palatable packaging, making culture consumable for an audience with little interest in the intricate, the sacred, or the challenging.
The supreme irony, of course, is that in this relentless simplification, culture forfeits its true power. When something is reduced to its aesthetic appeal alone, it loses its capacity to speak to us with depth, to challenge our perspectives, or to confront us with the uncomfortable truths it was born from. Ultimately, it is not the sari or the kimono that has been diminished, but our own capacity for understanding. We have refashioned culture into something that exists to serve our vanity, a commodity to be consumed rather than a teacher from which to learn. As we continue to purchase these symbols, wear these abbreviated stories, and hang them as décor on our walls, we overlook a fundamental truth: the road to authentic connection is paved with understanding, not ownership.
Genuine cultural exchange once implied a mutual sharing of knowledge, a crossing of boundaries in both directions. In our hyper-globalised world, that exchange has become profoundly uneven, tilted decisively towards extraction. What we choose to wear and consume reflects this imbalance. The modern “Silk Road" is no longer about connection; it is about consumption. When we deliberately strip away the richness of cultural symbols and distil them into Instagrammable moments, we are left with a road that leads nowhere of substance, terminating only in a marketplace where the sole currency is the illusion of access.
This, then, is the ultimate irony of our contemporary Silk Road: its purpose has shifted from sharing discovered treasures to selling sanitised replicas. In this relentless transaction, we have forgotten that the greatest gift any culture offers is not its surface-level allure, but the immense, challenging, and beautiful depth that lies beneath. Until we remember that essential truth, this well-trodden path will continue to lead us precisely nowhere.
Aesthetic Colonialism: When Beauty Becomes a Tool of Soft Erasure
Contemporary colonialism has shed its uniform. It no longer marches under a flag or blazes across maps drawn in imperial ink. In our present century, colonialism has adopted a softer, more insidious form, meticulously wrapped in the curated feeds of a thousand Instagram influencers. It conceals itself behind artful hashtags and flattering filters, often cloaked in the comforting illusion of “sharing," “appreciation," or “female empowerment." This new empire is no longer founded on territorial conquest and extracted gold; it is built upon imagery, aesthetics, and a refined form of cultural appropriation — the systematic extraction of beauty without context, the commodification of identity without the burden of respect.
This modern empire dispenses with the brute force of historical conquest. It requires no armies or coercive treaties. Instead, it operates through the quiet, relentless engine of consumption, feeding upon cultural symbols until they are drained of their original meaning, worn like a trendy jacket for a single season before being discarded for the next novelty. The new imperial currency consists of hashtags and fabrics, accelerated trend cycles and carefully crafted Instagram captions. It constitutes a seamless, almost invisible invasion that masquerades as “celebration," yet consistently leaves behind a ghost of the culture it borrowed — a diluted, distorted echo of the original.
Consider the sari, a garment deeply woven into the social and historical fabric of South Asia, worn by millions of women in ways that express centuries of regional tradition and personal identity. Now, observe that same sari featured on a model in a luxury brand’s editorial shoot, a brand with no tangible connection to the culture that birthed it. In this new context, the sari is stripped of its purpose. It ceases to be a symbol of lineage, a garment imbued with the memories of mothers and grandmothers. It is reduced to a mere aesthetic object, appropriated by a market conspicuously blind to the history woven into every stitch. For those who wear it as part of their living heritage, whose daily lives are informed by its cultural nuances, this transformation is a form of silencing. The sari, once rich with specific meaning, becomes a generic costume, an accessory to adorn a body in the pursuit of an idealised, and ultimately foreign, narrative.
Within the realm of aesthetics, this colonial impulse takes root with subtle potency. It does not demand obedience through force; it merely cultivates a desire within the global consumer to possess what others have, not for its soul, but for its superficial allure. We now inhabit a world where cultural symbols are systematically stripped of their essence and repurposed for a commercial agenda that thrives on creating a universalised, easily marketable beauty. The intricate beadwork of the Maasai, traditionally a complex language of status, age, and tribal affiliation, becomes little more than a “cute" accessory adorning Western celebrities at music festivals, the meaning behind the patterns entirely absent. This is appropriation — the act of taking something that does not belong to you and reshaping it to serve your own image.
Aesthetic colonialism finds particularly fertile ground in the intertwined worlds of fashion and social media. A hashtag like #BohoChic can effortlessly transform an entire culture’s aesthetic into a easily digestible, commercially viable image. In this new empire, beauty has become the primary currency. Its value, however, is determined not by its craftsmanship or its significance to the people who created it, but by the revenue it can generate in the marketplace. The West, or the so-called “global North," functions as the epicentre of this cultural commodification, where non-Western aesthetics are routinely borrowed, slickly repackaged, and sold as “exotic," thereby systematically erasing the layers of meaning embedded within those very symbols.
To illustrate the scale, the global fashion industry was valued at a staggering $2.5 trillion in 2018 by the McKinsey Global Fashion Index. A significant portion of this market is propelled by “ethnic chic" trends — styles that liberally borrow from non-Western cultures without offering acknowledgment, respect, or recompense. These trends, frequently showcased on the runways of international fashion weeks, go on to shape mainstream aesthetics worldwide. Yet this relationship remains profoundly one-sided. The non-Western cultures that inspire these trends rarely see a meaningful return for their contributions. Indeed, when iconic symbols from African, Asian, and Indigenous cultures are worn without context, it frequently leads to a perverse form of erasure, where the originating cultures are left marginalised in a marketplace that remains indifferent to their stories. In this way, aesthetic colonialism seizes the credit, discards the context, and consumes the culture itself.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of aesthetic colonialism is its presentation as a harmless, even progressive, practice. This modern form of conquest executes a quiet, pervasive erasure, systematically consuming the distinctive elements that form a culture's identity. It manifests in the casual ignorance that labels a fashion trend as ‘cool’ while remaining wholly uneducated about the centuries of history, and sometimes oppression, that shaped it. It is the Instagram post where the sacred salutation “Namaste" is reduced to a vapid hashtag, completely divorced from its spiritual gravity. It is the prestigious fashion house that generates profit from designs inspired by African prints without compensating or crediting African designers. It is, in essence, the constant erosion of living cultures, which become represented not by their people, but by stylised images and clichéd aesthetics, entirely detached from the realities of the lives that animate them.
To be clear, genuine cultural exchange can be a beautiful and mutually enriching dialogue, a space where cultures meet, learn, and grow together. What we are confronting today, however, is a grotesque pantomime of that ideal. This is cultural theft dressed in the fashionable garments of “appreciation." It is the commodification of beauty that wilfully ignores the complexities of identity, and in doing so, erases the very substance that made the culture beautiful in the first place. What remains are hollow images, shiny and superficially appealing, yet utterly devoid of authentic meaning.
The pressing question we must therefore confront is this: what price are we willing to pay for this kind of beauty? When we pilfer aesthetics without engaging with the culture behind them, we actively construct a world where beauty functions as a tool of erasure rather than celebration. A world where vibrant cultures are reduced to mere costumes, and complex histories are distilled into simplistic hashtags. This new empire abandons weapons, replacing them with the irresistible, scrolling allure of imagery. And within that seductive imagery, we stand to lose something infinitely more valuable than we comprehend: the stories behind the symbols, the depth behind the beauty, and the voices of the people whose lives are woven into every single thread.
Sacred as Spectacle
There’s something eerie about watching the sacred become a spectacle, akin to finding an ancient prayer reduced to a Pinterest mood board or observing a solemn ritual transformed into a retail experience. In our modern, ravenous pursuit of the “aesthetic," the world’s most venerable symbols have been flattened into visual shorthand for “spiritual vibes," meticulously filtered, framed, and stripped of their essence. The bindi, once pressed onto the forehead with quiet reverence, now sparkles in festival crowds, wedged between glitter and body paint. Henna, a ceremonial art form steeped in centuries of intimacy, is offered as a casual activity beside the margarita stand. Culture, once a lived experience, has been demoted to a mere accessory.
This is not a purist's lament for some mythical, unchanging purity. Cultures are living entities; they evolve, exchange ideas, and bleed into one another. This fluidity is their historical constant. Yet what we are witnessing today feels less like a natural evolution and more like a systematic erosion. The sacred is not merely being borrowed; it is being hollowed out, its core meaning extracted to be monetised. What remains is a beautiful, empty surface: the symbol, meticulously preserved, yet utterly divorced from its soul.
Consider the bindi in many South Asian traditions. It is far more than a decorative dot; it marks the ajna chakra, the spiritual third eye. It represents ritual, identity, and protection. It is worn by married women, by classical dancers, by children on holy days. There is a grounding significance in the quiet, daily act of pressing it into place, a form of wordless communication. Now, it flickers ephemerally in music videos, its context surgically removed, tacked onto foreheads like disposable rhinestones. Its purpose is no longer to honour tradition, but to create the illusion of doing so; to feel exotic, to suggest a depth of enlightenment available for three pounds in a Camden Market stick-on pack. Enlightenment, it seems, now comes with a convenient adhesive backing.
Henna, too, has suffered a similar drift from its origins. Once, it was drawn in intricate, symbolic patterns the night before a wedding, surrounded by the warmth of gossiping aunties and the laughter of young girls. It was an act of bonding, of blessing, of holding tradition in one's very skin. Now, it is brushed onto hands in boutique salons by technicians who remain unaware of the significance of hiding a beloved's name within the design. What was once a sacred rite of passage has been reduced to an “add-on" for a spa package. The deep significance of mehndi dissolves in the chlorinated water of a Malibu pool.
The central issue here is not the act of sharing culture. It is the mechanism of extraction. It is the deliberate discarding of meaning while greedily retaining the attractive motif. It is the dissonance of watching someone wear a bindi as a party accessory, while remembering the girl who wore one to school was once told it was “weird" or “too much." It is the particular sting of witnessing the same symbols that once marked you as foreign being rebranded as edgy and cool, but only once they have been surgically separated from you and your community. Your culture becomes palatable to the mainstream only when it is no longer recognisably yours.
This is also not about gatekeeping. It is about a quiet, persistent grief. It is about watching ceremony become content. There is a slow, aching sorrow in seeing something that once moved your grandmother to tears now used to sell beachwear. It feels like losing a language; the words are still spoken, but they have been emptied of all their original meaning. A sacred act becomes a weekend diversion, reduced to a backdrop for a Boomerang video or a passing reference in a lifestyle blog about “Eastern influences."
Even the language surrounding these traditions is co-opted and sanitised. Ritual becomes “trend." Cultural elements are “curated," “infused," or “reimagined." It is the coloniser's vocabulary for control, now effortlessly employed by magazine editors and influencers. Ceremony, once a vessel for collective memory, is treated as raw material for an aesthetic that acknowledges 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.
Perhaps the most galling expectation is the smiling politeness demanded from the people to whom these traditions truly belong. To voice discomfort is to be accused of “overreacting." The justifications are ready: “It is just fashion," “It is appreciation," “Take it as a compliment." But is it truly a compliment if it arrives without a shred of comprehension? If a symbol is taken, worn, and profited from, with no concerted effort to understand the joy, the context, the rules, or the pain embedded within it? Appreciation without genuine proximity becomes a hollow abstraction. The unspoken plea is simple: you do not have to love us. Just refrain from loving what we make while simultaneously pretending we do not exist.
And so the haunting question endures: what becomes of a culture when its rituals are borrowed like costumes for a party? When the objects you once knelt before now dangle from earlobes at a Sunday brunch? The consequence is likely undramatic. There will be no riots, no sensational headlines. Just a quiet, collective forgetting. A soft, insidious deletion of meaning. The kind of profound loss that fades without fanfare. Like henna washed from hands far too soon. Like a bindi left behind on a hotel bathroom mirror, a tiny, sticky circle adhering to nothing at all.
Museum Chic: The Price of Being Preserved
A particular form of violence exists that draws no blood. Instead, it polishes. It encases. It illuminates its subject with flattering, clinical precision. This is the quiet brutality of being transformed into an artefact: admired, respected, and utterly silenced. You cease to be a person or a people; you become “heritage." You become “inspiration." You are the museum exhibit, while someone else operates the lucrative gift shop.
The age of empire has not concluded; it has simply refined its wardrobe. It now manifests as heritage-inspired capsule collections, museum exhibitions underwritten by global fashion houses, and exclusive restaurants where your grandmother's recipes are served on forty-five-pound crockery with a fashionable ‘twist.' Cultures once dismissed as primitive or unrefined have become the aesthetic darlings of creative directors and Michelin-starred chefs. Yet the people themselves rarely receive an invitation to the table; only their culinary traditions are welcome.
Let us articulate this plainly: it is colonialism with superior lighting. The museumification of culture is an embalming process. A living tradition is extracted, vacuum-sealed in a veneer of respectability, and placed behind glass. An even more insidious fate awaits those traditions repackaged for the runway. Once rendered static, they become safe. Once they cannot answer back, they can be efficiently sold.
You will undoubtedly recognise the pattern. A luxury label “reimagining" tribal patterns with a three-thousand-pound price tag attached. A prestigious gallery exhibiting “indigenous crafts" without a single indigenous voice in the curatorial room. A music festival offering workshops on ancestral dance led by a white yoga instructor named Skye. We are instructed to call this appreciation. To the discerning eye, it bears a striking resemblance to a sophisticated resale operation.
A strange and biting irony permeates this dynamic. The very cultures once derided as too loud, too colourful, too uncivilised are now celebrated for their vibrancy and “authenticity," but only after being filtered through an acceptable, external lens. The value resides not in the sari itself, but in how you, the outsider, choose to wear it. The power is not in the chant, but in how it sounds when layered over a synthetic beat. The underlying message is unmistakable: your culture is beautiful, just not when you are the one embodying it.
Consequently, heritage transforms into a resource to be mined. It becomes a commodity harvested for logos, collections, and mood boards. Your rituals are content now. Your language is an aesthetic. Your historical struggles are reduced to a kind of rustic charm. The very elements of your identity that survived colonisation are now styled as postmodern whimsy and sold back to you at a markup you likely cannot afford.
Even institutions like museums, once considered dusty archives of the past, have fully embraced this aesthetic economy. They are now curated Instagram playgrounds. Heritage, but make it photogenic. “Experience" the exhibit. “Shop the look." The great tragedy of cultural loss now comes with a complementary tote bag. And throughout this spectacle, the voices of the cultures on display remain conspicuously silent. Or, in a more cruel twist, they are required to perform — a one-night panel discussion, a cultural ambassador flown in for a dash of authentic flavour. A human spice rack, briefly displayed.
The danger of museum chic extends beyond simple erasure; it is a process of replacement. When your culture is viewed exclusively through the curated lens of outsiders, their interpretation becomes the definitive one. Their version of the sari becomes high fashion. Their cookbook becomes the bestseller. Their podcast becomes the authoritative voice. You are no longer consulted as a source; you are, at best, cited in a footnote, and even that courtesy is rare.
To be preserved in this manner is to be erased in agonisingly high definition.
There is also a sadness in how we, the descendants of these cultures, begin to internalise this external gaze. We visit exhibitions of “our" own heritage with the detached curiosity of tourists. We wear our traditions once a year, if we wear them at all. We unconsciously start to crave the sanitised 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 in a display case. It is movement. It is dance. It is contradiction and vibrant colour and beautiful chaos. It is, above all, alive. Until someone decides it is far more profitable when presented as 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.
True culture — the kind that lives, sweats, weeps, and tells inappropriate jokes at the wrong moment — was never intended for curation. It was meant to be carried. It is meant to be mispronounced by your niece. It is passed down, imperfectly and beautifully. It is sung off-key at weddings and spilled during kitchen mishaps. It is fought over, laughed over, and worn daily until it frays at the seams. That is culture. Not the sterile mannequin, but the glorious, uncontainable mess.
So, the next time someone declares they “love your heritage," perhaps inquire which specific part they mean. The intricate embroidery, or the story of exile woven into its history? The aromatic spice, or the narrative of trade and conquest it carries? The surface beauty, or the immense burden it represents?
Because if they only desire the first, then what they truly love is not you — it is the costume.
Appropriation with Good Lighting: Pretty Faces, Empty Contexts
Somewhere between the clinical glow of the ring light and the effortless tap of ‘repost,' something sacred quietly evaporates. This is not theft in the conventional sense, with its drama and confrontation. Rather, it is a borrowing executed with a polished smile, filtered to an airbrushed perfection, and returned with the tags still attached, its essence spent. Cultural appropriation, in its contemporary iteration, has shed the brute force of empire in favour of a more insidious charm. It flatters with fervour. It praises with precision. It captions images “inspired by," and we are somehow expected to offer gratitude in return.
Influencer culture, with its artfully arranged smoothie bowls and curated displays of personal struggle, has perfected the craft of presenting beauty entirely divorced from context. It can post a video of a white woman sporting box braids and label the look “summery." It can don a sari for a wedding photoshoot and caption it “a dream." It can mime lyrics in languages it does not speak, perform dance routines whose cultural significance it does not grasp, and conclude with a coquettish wink. Somewhere in that unsettling gap, between aesthetic consumption and genuine cultural understanding, exists a form of violence that proves difficult to articulate, precisely because it is so impeccably dressed.
The defining characteristic of modern appropriation is its frequent lack of overt malice. This very quality is what renders it so devastatingly effective. Performative diversity thrives on a foundation of plausible deniability. A marketing campaign might proudly feature a Black trans model, a hijabi skateboarder, and a racially ambiguous individual with sculpted cheekbones, all while selling the same overpriced cardigan, manufactured by the same underpaid labourers, and funded by the same detached private equity firm. This is not diversity; it is optics. A superficial costume change. Inclusion treated as a seasonal accessory.
A telling term occasionally surfaces in these circles: “ethnic glamour." It is typically used to describe a certain je ne sais quoi borrowed from the Global South — the smouldering eye makeup of a Bollywood actress, the earth-toned elegance of a Moroccan riad, the spiritual chic of Tibetan prayer flags arranged just outside the camera's frame. These are aesthetic props, and there is no perceived need to understand a symbol's origin, or the historical cost associated with its journey into fashionability. All that is required is perfect lighting, a clever hashtag, and a caption exuding vague gratitude. The phrase “honoured to wear this beautiful garment" becomes a convenient substitute for the more challenging questions: what does this garment truly represent, to whom does that meaning belong, and what was the price of its creation?
A persistent question nevertheless echoes: is imitation not the sincerest form of flattery? The answer is a conditional yes. It is flattery only if the object of imitation is not simultaneously under systemic threat. It is flattery only if the people who originated the tradition are permitted to share in its profits and control its narrative. When these conditions are absent, the act transcends flattery and becomes erasure by elevation. It is the act of applauding so loudly that you drown out the very voice you claim to admire.
Social media has effectively transformed culture into a form of fast food: immediately gratifying, visually appealing, and fundamentally disposable. One week, the trend is kimchi; the next, it is Fulani braids. Everything is subject to the trend cycle; nothing is granted its context. And while audiences scroll through this globalised buffet of beauty, the living, breathing cultures behind the content continue to battle visa restrictions, racist policies, and the wearying reality of being considered exotic until the moment they become inconvenient.
Again, this is not an argument for gatekeeping. The objective is not to build fences around beauty. It is an appeal for responsibility. It is about discerning the crucial difference between learning and looting. When an influencer travels to Bali and describes an ancient temple as “such a vibe," something profound is being quietly flattened into background wallpaper. Spiritual traditions are reduced to set dressing. Human beings become part of the furniture. Culture is transformed from a living relationship into a mere aesthetic — something to be worn for a moment, not something to be lived and sustained.
Praise offered without understanding is not kindness; it is a form of consumption. It does not elevate the culture from which it borrows; it elevates the status of the borrower. It is dangerously easy to mistake this hollow applause for genuine permission, a confusion only compounded when that applause is accompanied by lucrative brand deals and social “allyship" credentials. Ultimately, this phenomenon reveals itself as a performance of proximity, rather than a celebration of difference. One must be close enough to the culture to be interesting, yet remain sufficiently distant to retain total control.
And so, we find ourselves back at the ring light. The pristine white backdrop. The delicately posed hand resting on a fabric that another's grandmother dyed by hand. A caption filled with heart emojis and entirely devoid of history. Beneath this immaculate surface churns the quiet, relentless machinery of an economy that rewards the aesthetic, penalises the authentic, and has the audacity to label this process ‘progress.'
A method for borrowing that does not constitute theft does exist. It involves active listening. It demands credit and fair payment. It requires the decentring of one's own perspective. Unfortunately, these essential practices rarely make for a compelling photograph.
And so we continue our endless scroll — past the hijabi yoga influencer, the indigenous beadwork on European runways, the Chinese calligraphy inked onto a stranger's ribcage.
All of it visually stunning.
All of it fundamentally borrowed.
All of it illuminated to perfection, with just enough light to obscure everything we have collectively chosen not to see.
What the Market Can’t Translate: Language, Grief, and the Un-Googleable Soul of Culture
The market possesses a distinct fluency in certain domains: logos, trends, manufactured scarcity. It excels at auctioning identity, pricing nostalgia, and branding memory until it becomes shelf-ready. Yet some things, mercifully, remain stubbornly untranslatable. Their resistance stems from an inherent refusal to be flattened. Grief, for instance. Or the specific timbre of a mother's scolding in a language no algorithm has yet mastered. Or the visceral feeling of a ritual performed with proper intent — not for a camera, a tourist, or an application.
Capitalism commands many dialects, and it speaks them with ruthless efficiency. Yet it stumbles, awkwardly and consistently, over reverence. It has no framework for handling phenomena that cannot be scaled, tagged, or assigned a monetary value. There exists no influencer campaign capable of monetising mourning. No “gifted" disclosure applies to the loss of a grandmother. Consequently, cultures that centre the intrinsically unsellable — the meaningful pause, the comfortable silence, the deeply particular — are often relegated to the status of the decorative. They are deemed interesting, even Instagrammable, yet somehow lacking in substantive reality.
There is a word in Tagalog: gigil, which describes that overwhelming surge of affection that makes one want to squeeze someone, almost to the point of pain. It finds no direct counterpart in English. Attempt to explain ubuntu, the Southern African philosophy of interconnected humanity, to an individual who measures success by LinkedIn endorsements. Try conveying duende, the Spanish concept of soulful, dark-edged creative struggle, to a venture capitalist pitching an AI startup for generating poetry. The barrier is not that translation is entirely impossible; it is that the most vital meanings often wilt when forcibly plucked from their native soil.
Language represents a frontier where the market repeatedly tries, and repeatedly fails, to conquer. This is why dubbed voiceovers of Bollywood films consistently miss the layered sarcasm. It is why Google Translate will invariably butcher the soul of an idiom. It is the reason a person's accent carries the ghost of a homeland, even when every other marker of their identity has been sanded down to a corporate neutrality. Language holds memory like a deep bruise quietly, enduringly, just beneath the surface. And this is a quality you cannot monetise. You may borrow the sound, the rhythm, even the elegant typography. But the weight, the accumulated history, remains beyond purchase.
This inherent resistance is also why grief unsettles the capitalist framework so profoundly. It refuses to follow a schedule. It cannot be optimised for productivity. It lingers, messy and inconvenient. In many cultures, mourning is a structured, communal ritual. These rules exist not because tradition is inherently rigid, but because the human soul requires scaffolding to navigate heavy loss. Grief without ritual is simply floating, unanchored pain. When a company attempts to “respect your loss" with a templated email or a promotional discount code, the chasm becomes glaringly apparent: they do not know how to sit with you in the dark; they only know how to illuminate it for content.
Ritual, much like language and grief, resists the swift, dismissive swipe. It is meant to be slow, deliberate, often repetitive to the point of tedium. This is its entire purpose. The repetition carves out a space for true presence. The body learns the motions, providing stability even when the heart falters. Whether lighting incense for ancestors, reciting centuries-old prayers, or tying a cloth around a tree as an offering, ritual anchors us to something far older than ourselves. It communicates a timeless truth: this is how we endure. Not by escaping our humanity, but by staying fully present with it.
Modern consumer culture, however, adores remixing the sacred into palatable aesthetics. Meditation is repackaged as a subscription-based app. Yoga is distilled into a specific body type promoted on social media. A Japanese tea ceremony becomes a hashtag for “matcha morning." With each soft-focus edit and minimalist reinterpretation, the original meaning is thinned, diluted. We consume without ever truly digesting. We wear the symbols without comprehending what they were designed to hold sacred. This is not theft in the conventional sense. It is something more subtle and perhaps more damaging: a gentle bleaching, a quiet, systemic forgetting.
The greatest tragedy may be that we are actively encouraged to find this process charming, to mistake it for global connection. Yet not all blending results in beauty. Sometimes it is simply erosion. A crucial distinction must be drawn between appreciating a meal and franchising it; between learning a language and mining it for decorative quotes; between witnessing a ritual and turning it into a content strategy.
Culture is not content. It was not created for your mood board. It owes you neither clarity nor convenience. At its core, culture is a vessel for carrying life — through storms, through joy, through the utterly ordinary Tuesday when everything aches for no discernible reason. It is not always pretty or palatable. But it is always, unflinchingly, true.
And so, the market, for all its pervasive power, ultimately fails in its translations. It cannot trademark the texture of sorrow. It cannot own the quiet force of devotion. It cannot algorithmically predict the way your cousin's laughter erupts when your uncle deliberately mispronounces an English word. And for that small, defiant grace, we can all be thankful.
Let there always be corners of the human experience that remain stubbornly unmapped. Let there be languages that never trend. Let there be grief that is permitted to stay sacred, heavy, and complicated.
Not everything should be rendered market-ready. Some things must remain, gloriously and essentially, untranslated.
The Refusal to Perform: Rituals of Resistance in a World That Orientalises
There exists a particular power in refusing to explain oneself. In the simple act of lighting a candle not for atmospheric effect, but because your grandmother insisted it wards off the misfortune carried by your mother’s lineage. In praying in a tongue you barely command, not because the script looks beautiful embroidered on a wall hanging, but because it is the precise manner in which the women before you whispered fortitude into shadowed rooms. These small, defiant acts, conducted far from the reach of hashtags and explanatory hover-text, transcend mere tradition. They constitute a form of quiet resistance, particularly potent in a world that incessantly demands your translation.
Edward Said provided the essential warning. Orientalism, he argued, extended beyond merely viewing the East through a Western lens; it was a process of fixing it in place, freezing vibrant cultures into postcard stillness, systematically stripping them of context to render them digestible. It transformed the richly complex into the softly exotic. The mosque became a backdrop for photography; the call to prayer, an atmospheric soundtrack. Culture was consumed as experience. Always with flattering lighting. Always accompanied by a grin of polite, detached interest.
Consequently, many learned to perform a version of themselves. We served diluted interpretations of our identities that would be easily palatable. Food that did not carry pungent aromas. Clothing that could be labelled “inspired by." Accents deliberately flattened for job interviews. Faith carefully compartmentalised for the comfort of white acquaintances. The marketplace has no desire for your wholeness; it seeks only your silhouette, a shadow it can effectively merchandise.
Authentic rituals, however, resist easy translation. They linger too long in the silence. They refuse to make sense in corporate bullet points. They demand you close your eyes in reverence, not pose for a camera. Herein resides their subversive strength. To light incense without offering an explanation. To observe a fast while the world indulges. To sing the old songs off-key in your living room simply because someone must carry the memory. These are acts of cultural preservation. They are acts of love. They are a gentle, yet potent, rebellion.
Within a global economy that voraciously feeds on visibility, choosing invisibility can function as a form of protection. The fact that you pray in the privacy of your room rather than on your social media feed is not a mark of shame; it is a strategic choice. The reality that the true story behind a festival remains absent from your caption is not a failure of communication; it is an assertion of freedom. Not everything held sacred requires legibility to the wider world. Not every truth needs to be translated for a trend cycle. A significant portion of our power resides precisely in what we consciously choose to withhold.
It is easy to assume that resistance must be loud and public. Placards. Hashtags. Marches. Protests. Yet sometimes, its most resilient form is a grandmother’s steadfast refusal to discard a cracked god-statue because she knows that is where its power resides. It is the act of pronouncing your given name correctly, even when others consistently butcher it, and repeating it with patience. It is wearing the red thread on your wrist, not for its aesthetic appeal, but because you were taught it offers protection. The empirical truth of its power is ultimately irrelevant; it protects because you believe it does, and that conviction is reason enough.
This particular form of resistance thoroughly confuses the Orientalist gaze. It insists on prioritising meaning over marketability, depth over decoration. It operates on its own internal logic — sometimes contradictory, often unclear, always richly layered. In this steadfast refusal to simplify, it maintains its integrity.
Rituals are not static relics, nor are they props for a photoshoot. They are living, breathing acts shaped by memory and muscle. To kneel in prayer, to chant ancient verses, to prepare the same ceremonial dish every New Year, even when you reside in a flat where the windows barely open is continuity.
In an era where nearly everything is meticulously curated and performed for an audience, genuine sincerity becomes a radical act. Not the aesthetic of sincerity, but the raw, unvarnished reality of it. The kind that requires no audience to be meaningful. The kind that remains utterly indifferent to whether it ever trends.
Therefore, light the candle. Recite the prayer. Tie the thread. Do not do it for them. Do not do it for the clicks. Do it for yourself. For the ancestors who paved your way. For the generations still watching, even if you have forgotten how to perceive them.
Let the ritual persist, gloriously unfiltered.
Let it remain beautifully confusing to the outsider.
Let it be unapologetically, entirely, yours.
Elegance, but Make It Ethical
Can the world of fashion ever genuinely honour the cultures it so frequently plunders for inspiration?
What would authentic appreciation resemble in practice, and could such efforts ever truly suffice?
The industry’s most persistent evasion centres on a simple and inconvenient truth that authenticity, in matters of cultural exchange, can never be achieved by repackaging borrowed heritage as groundbreaking originality. True appreciation requires a conscious acknowledgment of the history and struggle embedded within every intricate stitch, bead, and pattern. It requires recognising that a design carries a narrative woven into the fabric of generations, rather than functioning as a mere textile to be cut, sold, and worn without a second thought. The act of wearing a sari or a Maasai beaded necklace should carry the considerable weight of that history —t he struggles, the triumphs, the entire continuum of tradition that willed these objects into being. Yet, all too often, we wear these garments as mere badges of novelty, utterly detached from their origins, leaving the source culture ghosted by our casual consumption.
So, can fashion ever truly honour its sources? The question is inherently complicated, given that the industry’s very engine thrives on its ability to reinvent, to co-opt, and to reframe. The moment appropriation devolves into a fleeting aesthetic or a disposable trend, it abandons the true, complex value of the culture it mimics. Authentic appreciation necessitates not only respect, but explicit recognition. It involves honouring not just the craftsmanship, but the living people behind it, resisting the urge to reduce their entire history to a transient ‘look’ or a marketable ‘vibe’ for a social media feed.
Genuine appreciation would manifest as a practice of learning, of compensating fairly, not just sharing superficially. It would stand in direct opposition to trend-jumping or a brief, shallow dive into cultural costume. Instead, it would be rooted in fostering long-term, sustainable connections. It would compel us, as consumers, to hold ourselves accountable for the stories we choose to broadcast through our sartorial choices. A crucial distinction persists between borrowing with permission and stealing with impunity, between paying a meaningful homage and engaging in extractive appropriation. This line, however, becomes dangerously blurred when market forces aggressively transform culture into a hollow currency.
Is any of this ever truly enough? Perhaps not, at least within the current, relentless machinery of the fashion industry. The intricate beauty of a culture cannot be faithfully condensed into an Instagram post or ethically sold in a limited-edition collection. Yet, the potential for progress exists. In an era dominated by fast fashion and fleeting trends, the most radical answer may be to simply slow down. It calls for a renewed reverence for craftsmanship and narrative, for paying tangible tribute to the cultures that provide the ‘inspiration.’ Perhaps the solution involves moving beyond the creation of new, convenient ethical systems that ultimately serve consumerist desires, and towards a fundamental reshaping of our relationship with fashion entirely — a shift from a transactional model to one built on genuine respect, equitable exchange, and mutual understanding.
True elegance, it becomes clear, must be more than a superficial quality. It is about constructing something meaningful and enduring, reflected not only in the garment's exterior but in the depth of our respect for the cultures that have shaped the designs we claim to love. Whether the fashion world can ever truly achieve this, however, depends entirely on our collective willingness, as both creators and consumers, to look beyond the enticing surface and to truly listen to what is being so generously offered, rather than focusing exclusively on what can be taken.
S xoxo
Written in Miami, Florida
3rd May 2025