With a lack of fundamental understanding of the culture being pumped for design inspiration, there’s always the danger that a designer will shift from appreciating to appropriating without even noticing. Then, the whole damn enterprise gets flipped on its head. Instead of venerating a culture, we denigrate it.
Not exactly fair recompense for all that “inspiration.”
Jonathan Evans in Esquire on the thin line between cultural inspiration and cultural appropriation, addressing a recent case in which British label KTZ copied an Inuit shaman’s parka.