Cultural Appreciation vs. Appropriation: Where We Stand

By Liza Colbeck, founder of IN OUR NAME

I've spent three decades inside the global-north fashion system, in rooms where "ethnic prints" got tossed around like a trend forecast, where inspiration boards borrowed freely from cultures that never sat at the table, and where the word "authentic" functioned as a marketing claim rather than a structural reality.

Then I began working with the African Union, face to face with makers and communities whose visual languages were regularly turned into "collections" without their names, their consent, or their share of the value.

That shift changed how I build brands, and it's why IN OUR NAME exists the way it does. This piece is about a question that keeps coming up: when is fashion cultural appreciation, and when is it appropriation, and more specifically, where do we stand.

The Difference Isn't Semantics, It's Structural

Cultural appropriation, at its simplest, is taking a visual language from a culture without permission, credit, or context, reducing a living tradition to a look, in a way that benefits the brand more than the community it came from. Cultural appreciation is the opposite: engaging with acknowledgement and collaboration, so the source community has agency, credit, and a fair share of the value. The distinction isn't really about intention. It's about who controls the narrative, who gets paid, and who gets seen.

A Real Example, Not a Hypothetical One

This isn't an abstract debate. In October 2017, Stella McCartney showed her Spring 2018 collection at Paris Fashion Week using wax prints developed in collaboration with Vlisco, the Dutch fabric house that has produced wax-print textiles since 1846. The collection's own show notes described it as "a joyful exploration of British style." The runway featured few visibly Black or African models, and the choice to credit the prints' Dutch manufacturing heritage while largely leaving African models and designers out of the presentation drew significant public debate at the time, with commentators and models alike questioning how a print so closely associated with West Africa could be shown this way. It's worth noting the prints themselves have a genuinely tangled origin, developed from Indonesian batik and industrialised by the Dutch before being embraced and reinvented in West Africa, which made the debate more layered than a simple ownership question. What stayed consistent, whatever side people landed on, was the question of who was credited and who was visible.

Why We Don't Call It "African Print"

We made a deliberate choice early on not to use the term "African print." It isn't branding theatre. "African print" gets used as a catch-all for wildly different textiles and histories, flattening dozens of distinct traditions into one marketable aesthetic, and it's frequently attached to products designed and manufactured entirely outside Africa, sold with no real connection to the cultures being referenced. It lets a brand borrow the idea of Africa without engaging African people as creators, decision-makers, or beneficiaries. We'd rather talk about what's actually true: where something is made, who makes it, and what specifically inspired it.

What Appreciation Looks Like in Our Work

Designed in the UK and Kenya, Made Exclusively in Kenya

Our collections are designed in the UK and Kenya, and made exclusively in Kenya, in close collaboration with skilled makers and a small production partner in Athi River, Kajiado District. That's not a marketing line, it's how we operate, and you can read more about how and why on our founder's page. We design with our makers, not just for them, and we build long-term relationships rather than one-off inspiration trips.

Prints Inspired by Nature, Not Stereotypes

Our original prints are inspired by Africa's rich and vibrant nature and landscape, its colours, light, flora, fauna, and terrain, described specifically rather than as a monolith. We avoid generic "tribal" or "ethnic" framing, sacred symbols used out of context, and any language that suggests we own a culture rather than respond to it. More on the materials and thinking behind our prints is on our Our Materials page.

Credit, Visibility, and Shared Value

Appreciation requires that the people behind the work are named, credited, and fairly paid, not treated as inspiration with no attribution. This is also where my own background shapes how we operate: I contributed to the formative development of the Ethical Trading Initiative and SEDEX, two of the frameworks that now underpin responsible sourcing across the fashion industry, and we hold ourselves to that same standard rather than a lighter one. In practice, that means fair wages and safe working conditions as a baseline, and reinvesting in community projects like the MWALI project, which turns our fabric waste into reusable sanitary pads supporting women and girls in Kenya.

How to Spot Appreciation vs. Appropriation as a Shopper

You don't have to take our word for it. The same questions we hold ourselves to work for evaluating any brand:

• Attribution: Does the brand name the cultural source and explain the design's actual inspiration?
• Collaboration: Were designers, artisans, or cultural bearers from the represented community consulted or credited?
• Reciprocity: Does a portion of profit or support flow back to the community or creators?
• Context: Is the item presented with real historical or cultural context, rather than as a caricature?
• Sourcing transparency: Are materials and factories disclosed, and do they meet labour and sustainability standards?

If a garment carries a cultural name or motif and the brand has nothing to say about where it came from, that's usually the answer.

Where We Stand

Fashion will keep looking to the world for inspiration. That was never the actual problem. The problem is how it looks, who it includes, and where the value ends up.

We'll keep making in Kenya, with Kenyan artisans. We'll keep refining our language to avoid extractive terms like "ethnic prints" and vague labels like "African print." We'll keep naming our collaborators and investing in the projects that give back to the communities that inspire us. We don't claim to be perfect. We claim to be honest about how we work, and willing to keep improving it. You can browse the prints this thinking shapes on our Shop By Print page.