Fashion and Extractivism: Territorial Appropriation and the Absence of Retribution in Global Design

When brands celebrate what is “ancestral” and “artisanal” without involving the communities that sustain those traditions, inspiration becomes a mechanism that hides deeply asymmetric power relations.

I founded Bénieller in Colombia in 2014, a men’s swimwear brand manufactured with recycled fabrics by women who are heads of household. Over eleven years building that brand, I witnessed firsthand how global fashion treats territories like mine: as aesthetic reservoirs, material suppliers, and narrative backdrops, without establishing any meaningful mechanism of return. What follows is not abstract theory. It is a structural analysis of something I have lived from the inside.

Extractivism as a Systemic Pattern

Contemporary fashion operates within a global structure that reproduces historical inequalities by transforming territories of the Global South into reservoirs of raw materials, aesthetics, and cultural narratives — without establishing mechanisms of return. This dynamic reflects an economic order that, as Jason Hickel has argued, concentrates wealth in consumption centers while externalizing social and ecological costs to peripheral regions. Extractivism in fashion is therefore not an isolated phenomenon but a systemic pattern shaping how design is produced, circulated, and valued.

The concept of extractivism, originally applied to mining and agro-industrial economies, has migrated into cultural and creative industries with uncomfortable precision. In fashion, it manifests across three interconnected registers: aesthetic, material, and narrative.

Aesthetic Extractivism: Culture as Commodity

Aesthetic extractivism becomes visible when patterns, iconographies, or chromatic palettes originating from Indigenous or Afro-descendant communities are incorporated into collections without recognition or economic participation from their creators. The industry transforms collective knowledge into decontextualized commodities, reinforcing a logic in which culture is treated as a resource available to those with the power to commercialize it.

The notion of “inspiration” frequently functions as a legitimizing mechanism that obscures these power asymmetries. When a luxury brand cites Andean weaving traditions as “inspiration” while the communities that sustain those traditions receive neither credit nor revenue, inspiration becomes a sophisticated form of dispossession.

Material Extractivism: The Green Rhetoric Problem

Material extractivism intensifies pressure on vulnerable ecosystems. The global demand for natural fibers, botanical dyes, and mineral resources has generated new forms of exploitation that present themselves as sustainable while continuing to operate under the same logic of unilateral extraction. Green rhetoric adopted by many brands does not guarantee economic redistribution or community participation.

This is a critical distinction: sustainability claims can function as instruments of market legitimacy rather than indicators of genuine structural commitment. A brand sourcing “natural” materials from an Amazonian community while retaining all pricing power and intellectual property is not a sustainable actor — it is a more sophisticated extractive one.

Narrative Extractivism: Erasing Histories of Resistance

Narrative extractivism transforms complex territories into symbolic landscapes designed to fuel advertising campaigns. Fashion frequently relies on imagery from the Global South to construct narratives of authenticity, spirituality, or exoticism that function as cultural capital for brands operating from consumption centers in the North.

This aestheticization systematically erases histories of resistance, socio-environmental conflicts, and structural inequalities that shape these regions. As Anna Tsing has observed in her analysis of global value chains, these systems thrive precisely in contexts of vulnerability — in territories marked by economic or ecological precarity, local creativity becomes raw material for industries that do not establish reciprocal relationships.

Policy Implications: Where Design Meets Governance

This is where the analysis must move beyond individual consumer choice — which is how most brand-generated sustainability discourse frames the problem — and toward questions of governance and institutional design. The extractive logic of fashion is not a market failure that ethical consumption can correct. It is a structural condition that requires policy intervention.

Several mechanisms deserve serious attention from policymakers and international institutions. First, mandatory geographic and cultural traceability requirements, similar to existing frameworks in food systems, could establish baseline accountability for the origin of aesthetic and material inputs. Second, intellectual property frameworks urgently need to be extended to cover collective cultural knowledge — current IP law is designed for individual authorship and systematically fails communities whose creativity is collective and intergenerational. Third, value chain redistribution policies, modeled on fair trade certification but with regulatory teeth, could require verifiable economic participation by source communities.

Governments in the Global South — particularly in Latin America, where creative industries represent both economic opportunity and sites of cultural sovereignty — have a specific interest in developing frameworks that protect the creative commons of their territories. This is not protectionism; it is the design of systems that allow innovation to generate value where it originates.

Toward a Design Practice Built on Reciprocity

Some emerging initiatives demonstrate that it is possible to build fashion systems that do not depend on dispossession. These projects prioritize respect for territories, transparency across the value chain, and coherence between discourse and action. Their commitment to ethics is not a marketing accessory but the structural foundation of their identity.

An ethical design practice requires verifiable traceability, economic redistribution, direct collaboration with communities, and processes that regenerate rather than deplete ecosystems. It also demands responsible storytelling — representing territories in their complexity and dignity rather than through exoticized simplifications. In this sense, design shifts from being a purely aesthetic exercise to becoming a political practice oriented toward care and justice.

The question is not whether fashion can be ethical. The question is whether the systems within which fashion operates — legal, economic, institutional — will be redesigned to make ethics structurally possible rather than individually exceptional.

References

Hickel, J. (2020). Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. Heinemann.

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.

Mignolo, W. D., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Duke University Press.

Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Harvard University Press.