Credit Is Not a Law: What Maria Grazia Chiuri Doesn't Say About India's Craft

In a Mumbai gallery this month, women from the Chanakya School of Craft are exhibiting embroidered globes stitched entirely from imagination. Many of the makers have never held a passport. They cannot map the world they have never seen, so they stitched the one in their heads instead, filling it with rivers, temples and memory. It is, by any measure, art. It is also, by the account of the two women who built the atelier that made it possible, at constant risk of becoming someone else's unattributed inspiration.

That tension sits at the centre of a Forbes India interview marking thirty years of collaboration between Maria Grazia Chiuri, Fendi's chief creative officer and Christian Dior's former creative director, and Karishma Swali, who runs Chanakya International and the Chanakya School of Craft in Mumbai.

Asked what Italy's fashion houses lost that India must not, Chiuri is direct: craft knowledge in Italy was "passed down through generations, often from mothers to daughters," and "over time, a lot of that knowledge disappeared." Asked how India can better protect what remains, Swali is just as direct: "Credit matters, so does storytelling."

Credit as Ethics, Not Law

What neither woman says, because the interview does not ask them to, is that "credit matters" is currently a matter of personal ethics in the Indian fashion-craft economy. Chiuri and Swali have sustained an equal, credited, thirty-year partnership because both of them have chosen to run it that way. Nothing in Indian or European law would have required either of them to. That is the quiet omission worth sitting with, because the same year this interview was published, two other luxury houses demonstrated exactly what happens when that choice is made differently. Let’s look at the two.

"Chiuri's insistence on crediting Chanakya's embroiderers has been generosity, not obligation. Generosity is not a viable policy."

The Kolhapuri Precedent

In its Spring/Summer 2026 collection, Prada showed sandals unmistakably modelled on the Kolhapuri chappal, a handcrafted leather sandal made in Maharashtra and Karnataka using vegetable-tanned techniques passed down through generations of cobbler communities. The backlash was intense. It was also immediate. The legal response was entirely lacklustre. Kolhapuri chappals have held a Geographical Indication (GI) registration since 2018, jointly held by two state development corporations with over nine hundred authorised producers.

Yet legal commentary on the episode converged on the same flawed conclusion: Prada infringed nothing. A GI tag, it was argued, protects a name, not a design or a technique. Prada never called its sandals "Kolhapuri." It borrowed the form and left the word behind, and the law, built to stop false claims of origin rather than uncredited inspiration, had no remedy to offer. Prada later held talks with Maharashtra's government and local artisans over co-branding, a gesture of goodwill. This is simply not good enough.

A Coat Without a Country

The second episode is closer to home for Chiuri. In June 2025, Dior's Paris runway, under its new creative director Jonathan Anderson, showed a gold and ivory coat priced at a staggering $200,000, embroidered using Lucknow's centuries-old mukaish technique by twelve Indian artisans over thirty-four days. Dior's own communications about the coat made no mention of India, the artisans, or the craft's name. The house that Chiuri once led, that she used specifically to credit Chanakya's embroiderers for years, produced this coat within months of her departure.

The technique did not change. The choice at the top did.

What Indian Law Actually Protects

When one lines these three stories up, the gaps in Indian law's coverage come out in the open like sore wounds. GI tags protect a place-name against misuse, not a motif or a method, so a chappal-shaped sandal is untouched so long as no one says "Kolhapuri" on the label. On the other hand, Indian copyright law on moral rights, under Section 57 of the Copyright Act, 1957 is incomplete at best. It protects an individual author's right to be credited and to object to distortion.

These laws, based on the individualist notions that formed the ideological basis for instruments like the 1886 Berne Convention, were built for identifiable authors of literary and artistic works, not for a collective, or a generations-old tradition practised by hundreds of largely unnamed hands. India’s design law protects a specific registered design for a limited term, not a living technique still being taught to the next artisan.

Amongst them, there is no legal category that says: when a global house draws on an Indian craft tradition, the tradition's origin and its makers must be credited and reimbursed. Chiuri's insistence on doing exactly that has been generosity, not obligation. Generosity is not a viable policy.

Lessons for India

Chiuri and Swali are right that India still has what Italy lost, and they are right that the loss, when it comes, will not announce itself as a single dramatic event. But their real warning is not this.

Craft traditions are not only endangered by disappearing hands; they are endangered by a legal architecture that lets any fashion house absorb their motifs while owing their makers nothing beyond what its creative director happens to feel is right. India does not need to invent this protection from nothing. The World Intellectual Property Organization's long-running, still unresolved negotiations on traditional cultural expressions were built for precisely this gap, and India has participated in them for over two decades without domestic legislation to show for it. A modest legislative fix, requiring disclosure of craft origin and community consultation whenever a registered design or luxury collection draws substantially on an identified traditional technique, would not stop the next Prada or Dior. It would at least mean the next one owes something more than an apology issued after the backlash has already done the work the law should have done first.