Why Patents and GI Tags are Failing the Kolhapuri Artisan 

Introduction 

A sandal with a price tag of ₹1,20,000, was made famous by Milan’s runway in June 2025. Otherwise, if you were not aware of the irony, no apologies. The law missed the mark as well.  

Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 men’s collection was revealed during Milan Fashion Week. In a leather sandal that came out of the linen blazer and architectural trousers, a leather big toe loop, T-shaped leather construction, and leather braiding appeared. The fashion press described it as “elemental.” “Minimalist. 

It had another name among the cobblers of Kolhapur, Maharashtra. Their word “The Kolhapur chappal” had walked a Milan runway, without a ticket, a credit, or a royalty, and the community of Charmakar artisans that makes them had been royal artisans since at least the 12th century. The price of Prada’s version was around ₹1.2 lakh per pair. On a good day, the artisans who invented every design element that Prada is now monetising and makes subsistence wages.  

The act of Parada was witnessed worldwide, But the law? The law blinked.  

The Patent Problem 

Heritage cannot be ‘Novel’. The first misconception is, why can’t the artisans of Kolhapur just patent their chappal design and be done with it? The harsh beauty of the patent law’s logic “If it’s new, it’s patentable. It must be new. It can’t have been around previously.” 

The Kolhapuri chappal has been in existence for 800 years. According to the definition of the patent law, it’s the exact opposite of novel. In fact, it falls under the ambit of Traditional Knowledge (TK) of prior art which means the collective wisdom of generations that is too old for patent protection and too recent to be ignored by those who would profit from it. The structure of patent law is designed for the solitary inventor in the laboratory and not the community of living practice over a long period of time. This is the “open season” scheme where a traditional craft can be studied by a luxury brand’s designers, the essence abstracted, reproduced using high quality materials and the origin and culture removed from the object and then sold at a 12,000% profit margin. There is no prohibition in the Patents Act against them. There are no design law barriers to them. This is a framework in which the artisan community has no enforceable rights. A stolen soul adorned in style.  

The GI Tag Limitation: A Padlock with No Door 

A padlock with no door is a tag that is applied to a product as a limitation which is a tag attached to a product with no door. In 2019, Kolhapuri chappals got the Geographical Indication (GI) tag under the Geographical Indication (GI) Act, 1999 in India. It is a joint registration by LIDCOM (Maharashtra) and LIDKAR (Karnataka) for the handcrafted chappals from eight different districts of both states. It’s a good sounding system of protection on paper. It’s a padlock affixed to a door that never existed. 

The GI Act actually bans this: Use of the word “Kolhapuri” in the wrong way. It is meant to stop somebody from making a machine-made sandal in Guangzhou and claiming it is an “Authentic Kolhapuri”. What it doesn’t and can’t do is stop a brand from reproducing all the visual, structural and aesthetic elements of the chappal, but not including the word Kolhapuri on the product. Prada’s sandals were called “Sandals”. A term that is used in common parlance. On 2nd July 2025, advocate Ganesh S. Hingmire argued in this PIL in the Bombay High Court that the visual reproduction made by Prada essentially amounted to GI infringement – that the design itself serves as an indication of origin. It’s a strong case and one that could serve as a precedent. It also, however, is a modern leap on the statute books. The GI Act is conceived to safeguard names and labels. It may be begging to protect aesthetics, as if a bike were to run in a Formula One race. 

Ethical Extraction 

“The Economics of Erasure” Let’s be precise about what happened here, because that’s not a moral phrase, euphemisms like that don’t have a moral, more than 10,000 families in Maharashtra and Karnataka are reliant on this craft. Many are trapped in exploitative processes of intermediation, the “Set-Mukadam” system, which forces them to accept paltry advances and long hours of work, usually more than 14 hours per day. A craft which used to be the daily living of almost 95% of the local Charmakar community is now practiced by only a handful. The young craftsmen are going away. The economics just don’t work out. In the meantime, a Milanese fashion house takes pictures of those same design features and drapes them in top quality leather for €750 per pair, and sells them in 40 stores around the world. The artisan who invented everything Prada has chosen to use the T-strap, the toe-ring loop, the braided leather aesthetic, sees none of that money. This isn’t inspiration. In fact, as one Kolhapuri manufacturer bluntly said, “We are indeed the ‘prototype’ manufacturers for luxury brands”. The backlash was intensive enough for Prada to eventually turn around.  

In 2026 the brand re-introduced a limited edition “Made in India & Inspired by Kolhapuri Chappals” line, made in partnership with LIDCOM, LIDKAR, and the National Institute of Fashion Technology. The cost of the pair is approximately ₹84,000, which depends on the education of the artisans. There is a partial redemption, but one which has only come under the pressure of a PIL, social media pressure and diplomatic embarrassment. If it wasn’t for that pressure the original erasure would have remained. 

The Future: Sui Generis or Simply Surrender 

The Prada-Kolhapuri controversy is not out of the ordinary. It is a template, and has been tried with Banarasi silk, Pochampally ikat, Pashmina, and dozens of other GI tagged crafts. Today, there are three forms 

• Patents (novelty is a requirement; inapplicable to traditional knowledge);  

• Trademarks (for protecting the name of a brand; inapplicable to visual aesthetics); and  

• GI tags (for protecting a geographic name, not traditional knowledge). No one has constructed them for this one.  

A Sui Generis “of its own kind” legal regime for (Traditional Cultural Expressions) TCEs is required. Such a framework is being negotiated for decades at the international level by WIPO’s Intergovernmental Committee on Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore. In those rooms India has spoken out with a great deal of loudness. But the domestic legislation is nowhere in sight. A dedicated TCE Protection Act that provides community-owned and perpetually renewable rights for visual, aesthetic and cultural assets of traditional crafts, with the inclusion of stringent benefit-sharing clauses to any commercial use is not a radical proposal. This is a late one! If such a law were enacted, then any brand wanting to use the T-strap geometry, braided leather and toe-ring loop of the Kolhapuri chappal would need to be issued a licence by the GI-registered body, and pay royalties to the artisan community. For the first time in her career, style with substance. Until then, every luxury runway is open season on our most vulnerable artisans. 

“The devil, it turns out, doesn’t just wear Prada”, She wears Kolhapuri chappals She just forgot to say so “and the law let her.” 

References 

Khurana & Khurana ,“Of Couture and Tradition: The Prada-Kolhapuri Chappal Controversy and the IPR Dilemma” (August 28, 2025), Analysis of the PIL filing, TCE/TK gaps in Indian domestic law, and WIPO’s ongoing negotiations.

Live India “Do They Have Gold In Them?’: Kolhapuri Makers Slam Prada” (July 5, 2025), Artisan community reactions, economic data from MACCIA, the history of the Charmakar community, and the 2015 Maharashtra cow-slaughter ban’s impact on raw material costs.  

NewsX,“Prada Faces Backlash Over Rs 84,000 ‘Kolhapuri-Inspired’ Chappals” (April 28, 2026), Coverage of the 2026 relaunched collection with LIDCOM, LIDKAR, and NIFT; consumer and online reactions.