Fendi’s ‘Navratri’ bag: When a festival tradition enters the luxury bazaar. An ₹8 lakh handbag has revived an old debate around who gets to own India’s craft stories

 Old familiarities often arrive in unfamiliar places.

A handcrafted object from an Indian marketplace can suddenly appear under the spotlight of a global luxury house, transformed from a community tradition into a coveted fashion statement. The latest conversation around Fendi’s Baguette 26424 Multicolour Re-Edition — popularly dubbed the “Navratri bag” on social media — a creation featuring vibrant embroidery, beads and mirror-like embellishments and priced at around ₹8.3 lakh, has once again brought India’s relationship with global luxury into focus.

 

It is important to make a distinction at the outset. Fendi itself does not call this a “Navratri bag”. The name emerged online after Indians began pointing out the visual similarities. Officially, it is the Baguette 26424 Multicolour Re-Edition, introduced as part of Fendi’s Fall/Winter 2026-27 collection. Nor is it an entirely new design: Fendi describes the bag as a reimagining drawing on its original No. 26424, from the history of the Baguette, which debuted in 1997.

 

And yet, for many Indians, the visual connection was immediate. The colours, textures and festive vocabulary appeared closely linked to the decorative traditions associated with Navratri celebrations, particularly the embroidered bags and accessories that have long been part of Gujarat and Rajasthan’s cultural landscape

 

Moreover, the workmanship is extraordinary by any measure: Fendi says this version contains 39,500 beads and 475 mirrors, all embroidered by hand in a process requiring more than 138 hours. The question that followed was not merely about design similarity or pricing; it was about something far more fundamental — when an element of living culture enters the luxury marketplace, whose story is ultimately being told?

 

In this context, industrialist Harsh Goenka asked: “When will luxury brands stop colonising our crafts?”. While entrepreneur Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw argued that “Indian craftsmanship deserves recognition, not imitation”. 

 

This debate comes only a year after the controversy around Prada’s Kolhapuri-style sandals, when questions were raised about the relationship between global luxury and indigenous craftsmanship. I had written then about how heritage cannot become an invisible raw material for international brands — admired, extracted and repackaged, while the communities that preserved it remain anonymous.

 

The issue is not that the world is discovering Indian craft. In fact, that is something India should celebrate. The question is different: when does appreciation become appropriation? And when a centuries-old cultural vocabulary enters the world of luxury, who gets credited for the story?

 

Luxury is not just about the object, it is also about the narrative behind it

A luxury product is never merely a product. It is a story. A mirror-work bag is not simply a combination of colourful threads, beads and reflective surfaces. It carries memories of festivals, communities, artisans and generations of skill. The embroidered textile traditions of India were not created inside fashion studios. They evolved through the hands of craftspeople whose knowledge was passed down over decades and centuries.

The concern expressed by many critics is not that global brands should never draw inspiration from India. Culture has always travelled. Civilisations have always borrowed, adapted and transformed.

 

But borrowing without storytelling creates an imbalance. When a craft technique travels from an artisan community to the global luxury market, the journey of that craft should travel with it. The name of the tradition, the people behind it and the cultural landscape that nurtured it deserve a place in that narrative.

 

Because recognition is not merely symbolic. Recognition shapes markets, opportunities and livelihoods.

 

The Fendi debate is more complicated than it first appears

However, every cultural conversation deserves fairness and accuracy.

And this is where the Fendi episode becomes considerably more interesting than the first wave of social-media outrage suggested. The bag is connected to Mumbai-based Chanakya, one of India’s most accomplished embroidery ateliers, and Fendi has publicly acknowledged Chanakya’s artisans. In April this year, Fendi itself shared their work, describing how sequins, beads and mirrors were transformed through the “skilled hands of Chanakya artisans”.

 

This is not a hurried collaboration assembled in response to the current enthusiasm for Indian craft. Chanakya and Fendi have a relationship stretching back decades. Karishma Swali, who leads Chanakya, first met Italian fashion designer Maria Grazia Chiuri in Rome in the mid-1990s, when Chiuri was working at Fendi. Their creative association subsequently continued through Chiuri’s years at Dior, where Indian artisanship became a significant part of several major projects. Chiuri returned to Fendi as Chief Creative Officer in 2025 — a homecoming to the house where she had worked from 1989 to 1999 and helped develop the Baguette itself.

There is another dimension worth recognising. Chanakya’s work today extends beyond producing embroidery for international fashion houses. The Chanakya School of Craft, established in 2016, is a non-profit initiative dedicated to preserving craft while creating greater economic and creative autonomy for women. Its curriculum encompasses more than 300 hand-craft and embroidery techniques, and the school says it has trained more than 1,000 women across age groups and socio-economic backgrounds. Women from underserved communities are given opportunities to learn traditions ranging from hand embroidery to techniques such as zardozi, while acquiring skills that can translate heritage into livelihoods.

These facts matter because they change the contours of the argument. This is not quite a simple story of a Western fashion house spotting an Indian bag, reproducing it in Europe and erasing the Indian hands behind it. There is genuine Indian craftsmanship and a longstanding Indian creative partnership within the Fendi story.

 

But that does not make the larger question disappear. It makes it more nuanced. 

The issue is not simply whether Indian hands were involved. The deeper question is whether Indian heritage, Indian craftsmanship and Indian artisan knowledge receive the visibility they deserve when they become part of global luxury.

 

India must move from being the inspiration to owning the narrative

For too long, India has been treated as a source of inspiration rather than a source of authorship.

 

Our motifs, fabrics and techniques have travelled globally — paisley, block printing, embroidery, mirror work, weaving traditions, jewellery forms. Yet the global conversation around them has not always carried the names, histories and communities that gave them life.

 

I write this in the same week as Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s New York fashion show, “Bengal Byzantine Broadway”, where he once again took not just India’s, but Bengal’s, cultural imagination to the world stage. Conceived in Kolkata and brought to life by master artisans, the collection was described as transforming cultural memory into modern heirlooms — contributing a distinctly Indian voice to an enduring global narrative. 

 

It captures an important truth about heritage: the past survives not by remaining frozen, but by continually inspiring the present. Every meaningful cultural object exists in the space between memory and invention.

 

This is perhaps the larger conversation India needs to have with global luxury. The question is not whether Indian traditions should travel — they always have. The question is whether, when they travel, India remains visible as the source of the imagination, rather than merely becoming the invisible foundation beneath someone else’s creation.

 

Today’s Indian consumer is confident, informed and deeply connected to cultural identity. India is also emerging as a major player in the global luxury market. The relationship between India and international luxury cannot remain one-sided — where India provides inspiration while others define the value of that inspiration.

 

The Chanakya story, in fact, points towards what the next stage could look like. If Indian ateliers are capable of executing work at the highest levels of global couture — and if Indian craftspeople can spend more than 138 hours creating an object that commands a global luxury price — the ambition must ultimately extend beyond being the world’s exceptional workshop. India must increasingly own the brands, intellectual property, narratives and economic value built around its craft traditions.

 

We must build stronger systems to document, protect and promote our crafts. We must invest in artisan communities. We must ensure that Indian designers and entrepreneurs tell these stories on their own terms.

 

The answer is not to reject global engagement. The answer is to enter that engagement with confidence.

 

The world should not merely borrow from India. It should understand and appreciate India, too.

 

This article was published in The Sunday Guardian