The guilt isn't the West's to carry. It's ours, for never putting India on our own

mood boards to begin with. 

Here is a strange loop that plays out constantly. When a product gets made for

an Indian customer, sold to an Indian customer, priced for an Indian customer,

but the moodboard behind it is entirely Western. Muted tones, clean lines, a kind

of quiet beige that photographs well. Somewhere along the way, someone decided

that if a product wants to feel premium, it has to look like it belongs in Scandinavia,

not in India. 

We treat heritage like a museum exhibit, something to visit at festivals and

weddings, not something to build with every day. Meanwhile, the West keeps

mining us for the same ideas we've stopped using. Prada put out sandals last year

that were basically Kolhapuri chappals, priced at $844 while the real ones sell in

Kolhapur for about $12. Ralph Lauren sent a ₹44,800 skirt down the runway this

year, "inspired by Bandhani," alongside jhumka earrings, no India credit anywhere

in sight. There was even a whole controversy over a dupatta getting rebranded as

a "Scandinavian scarf." Still, we keep looking west for inspiration while the west

keeps quietly walking off with ours. 

You don't need a moodboard for this. Take a walk down any Indian street. You'll

see India from the 80s sitting right next to the India of today. Painted trucks, hand

lettered shop signs, marigold garlands against pink walls, steel tiffins next to neon

signage. Nobody staged that. It happened because colour was never something

India needed to justify. 

So here's the actual question worth sitting with: why does none of that look

premium to us, until Prada says it does? The same pattern, the same colours, the

same craft,nsitting quietly on an Indian street corner for decades, suddenly gets

called luxury the moment it walks a European runway. 

Next time you're building a moodboard, search for any aesthetic and then add

"Indian" to the same search. Watch what happens to your own eyes. The colour

jumps. The pattern density goes up. Your pupils genuinely do more work

processing an Indian visual than a muted western one, because there is simply

more happening in it.  

This isn't a new relationship. Long before runways, the world was already

restructuring itself around what India had. Spices, textiles, dyes, all of it was worth

fighting wars over. The desire was never in question. What's changed is who gets

to profit from it, and who gets remembered as the source. 

Somewhere in the last decade, minimalism became shorthand for taste. Neutral

palettes, negative space, restraint as a personality. It's a fine aesthetic. It is also

not ours and treating it as the only path to "premium" quietly tells an entire design

language that its instincts are wrong. Maximalism has an aura that minimalism

simply doesn't carry, layers, colour, ornamentation, all doing something at once.

It just hasn't been marketed back to us as aspirational yet. 

India can't fit into a Western moodboard because India was never that, we are

diverse. Kanjeevaram, Banarasi, Kalamkari, Saharanpur wood carving, Chettinad

tiles, Pokhran pottery, Dhokra, coir, jutis - the list is long and each one carrying its

own region, its own hands, its own centuries. You see this same refusal to simplify

everywhere: in cinema, in architecture, in art, in the way a single street can hold

five different visual languages at once without any of them cancelling the other out. 

We can go loud, because India was always loud. So wear more, paint more, talk

more, write more, all of it in our own colours, until people stop needing a Paris

runway to tell them it's beautiful. Let the reaction just be: wow, that's a proper

desi moodboard.