. Introduction
In June 2025, the Italian luxury house Prada displayed a line of ‘toe-ring sandals’ at its Summer 2026 menswear show in Milan, priced at roughly ₹1,20,000 a pair. Within hours, Indian commentators had matched the silhouette to the Kolhapuri chappal, a leather sandal registered as a Geographical Indication (‘GI’) since 2018 in the name of two state-owned artisan corporations in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Prada never used the word ‘Kolhapuri.’ It called the shoes sandals, and only after sustained public pressure did the house acknowledge that the design was ‘inspired by traditional Indian handcrafted footwear.
The episode exposes a structural weakness in Indian intellectual property law that no single statute was built to close. India’s GI regime protects a name tied to a place; it was never engineered to protect the silhouette, technique, or form that makes a craft recognisable once its name is withheld. This article argues that the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999 offers Indian artisan communities a narrower and more fragile form of protection than the public reaction to the Prada controversy assumed, and that the gap it leaves exposed is neither unique to Kolhapuri nor confined to India. The article proceeds in four parts. Part II sets out the domestic legal framework governing GIs and its relationship to the neighbouring regimes of patent, design, copyright and trademark law, together with the relevant international standard under the TRIPS Agreement. Part III examines the Bombay High Court’s dismissal of the public interest litigation brought against Prada and a comparable foreign dispute involving the Mixe community of Oaxaca. Part IV evaluates the adequacy of the present framework across a wider family of Indian textile GIs and considers the case for reform.
II. Legal Framework
A. The Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999
The World Intellectual Property Organization defines a geographical indication as a sign used on products having a specific geographical origin and qualities attributable to that origin. The Indian Act gives this idea statutory form: a GI is one that identifies a good as originating in a territory, region or locality, where a given quality, reputation or characteristic of the good is essentially attributable to that geographical origin. Registration confers on the proprietor and its authorised users the exclusive right to use the indication in relation to the registered goods.
Infringement is defined narrowly around the name rather than the appearance of the goods. Under section 22(1)(a), a registered GI is infringed by a person who uses it, or a means suggesting it, to designate goods that do not truly originate from the protected area, in a manner that misleads as to geographical origin. Section 22(1)(b) extends this to acts of ‘unfair competition,’ a term explained to include conduct that creates confusion with a competitor’s goods, false allegations discrediting a competitor, or use likely to mislead as to the nature or characteristics of goods. Section 22(1)(c) further catches a person who uses a different, literally accurate geographical name to falsely suggest that goods originate from the area covered by the registered GI. Section 22(3) closes an obvious evasion by treating the use of a protected indication together with qualifying words such as ‘kind,’ ‘style’ or ‘imitation’ as infringement in its own right. Registration is also made prima facie evidence of the validity of the GI and of the proprietor’s title in any legal proceeding.
What section 22 does not do, on any reading, is prohibit the reproduction of a registered product’s visual form once its name is withheld. Every limb of the provision is anchored to the use of the geographical indication itself, whether directly, in translation, or dressed up with a qualifying word. A manufacturer who reproduces the T-strap construction, tan leather braiding and flat sole of the Kolhapuri chappal, but never writes or utters the word ‘Kolhapuri,’ falls outside the section as drafted. This is precisely the position Prada is understood to have occupied.
B. The Limits of Neighbouring IP Regimes
The gap is not filled by the surrounding architecture of Indian intellectual property law, because none of it was designed for communally authored, undocumented craft forms. A patent protects a novel, non-obvious invention disclosed for the first time; it cannot attach to a sandal pattern inherited rather than invented. A design registered under the Designs Act, 2000 must be new and must not have been published anywhere prior to the application, a threshold the Kolhapuri silhouette, in continuous use since the era of the Kolhapur princely state, could not now meet. Copyright requires a work fixed in a material form by an identifiable author exercising a modicum of creativity; a technique refined anonymously across generations by an entire artisan class supplies no such author. A trademark, finally, is a proprietary right of a single undertaking in commerce, and offers no vehicle for a form of craftsmanship practised communally by an entire class of producers rather than a firm. Geographical indications exist precisely because these four regimes leave a gap for a name tied to a place; the difficulty is that the gap they fill is narrower than the one the Prada controversy revealed.
C. The TRIPS Asymmetry
The Act’s limits mirror an asymmetry written into the international framework it implements. Article 22 of the WTO’s TRIPS Agreement sets the baseline obligation for all Geographical Indications: member states must prevent uses that mislead the public as to geographical origin or that constitute unfair competition. Article 23, however, grants a markedly stronger, confusion-independent standard, one that bars use of a protected indication even where the public is not deceived and even where the true origin is disclosed, but reserves this heightened protection exclusively for wines and spirits. Handicrafts, textiles and foodstuffs, however communally rooted, remain confined to Article 22’s weaker test. India, together with a coalition of developing countries, has pressed the WTO’s TRIPS Council since the Doha Round to extend Article 23-level protection beyond wines and spirits; the proposal has met two decades of resistance from the negotiating partners whose exports it would burden, and no consensus has emerged. In parallel, the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore has spent more than twenty years attempting to negotiate a sui generis instrument for the protection of Traditional Cultural Expressions, the very category into which a Kolhapuri chappal or a hand-woven huipil falls, without yet producing a binding treaty.
III. Case Law Analysis
A. Hingmire v PRADA Group
On 2 July 2025, IPR advocate Ganesh S. Hingmire, together with five other advocates, filed a public interest litigation before the Bombay High Court seeking an injunction against Prada, a public apology, compensation for affected artisans, and stricter governmental enforcement of GI protections. The matter came before a Division Bench of Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice Sandeep V. Marne, which dismissed the petition on 16 July 2025. The Bench questioned the petitioners’ standing directly, asking what locus and what public interest was engaged by advocates who were not themselves owners of the registered GI. Counsel for Prada, Senior Advocate Ravi Kadam, argued that no element of genuine public interest was engaged and that the appropriate remedy lay in a civil suit brought by the registered proprietors, the Sant Rohidas Leather Industries and Charmakar Development Corporation (LIDCOM) of Maharashtra and the Dr. Babu Jagjivan Ram Leather Industries Development Corporation (LIDKAR) of Karnataka, under the statutory mechanism the GI Act already provides. The Court agreed, holding further that the question of deceptive similarity between Prada’s sandals and the Kolhapuri chappal involved disputed questions of fact requiring evidence, and could not be resolved in a writ petition under Article 226 of the Constitution. It expressly clarified that its dismissal did not prevent LIDCOM or LIDKAR from initiating proceedings against Prada in accordance with law.
The ruling is best read as a decision about procedure rather than substance: the Court never reached, and did not need to reach, the question of whether Prada’s sandals in fact infringed the registered GI. That question remains open, and on the analysis above, the answer is likely to turn less on any resemblance in form and more on the narrow, name-based test that section 22 actually applies. Separately, the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture wrote to Prada seeking acknowledgment of the design’s origins; the company’s head of corporate social responsibility, Lorenzo Bertelli, responded that the sandals were ‘inspired by traditional Indian handcrafted footwear, with a centuries-old heritage,’ while stopping short of any admission of infringement or offer of compensation.
B. A Comparative Precedent: Marant, Antik Batik and the Mixe of Tlahuitoltepec
The pattern recurs outside India. Isabel Marant’s Spring/Summer 2015 ‘Étoile’ collection featured a blouse whose embroidery was, to observers in Oaxaca, indistinguishable from the traditional huipil of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, a 600-year-old Mixe design. The controversy took an unusual turn when the French label Antik Batik separately claimed copyright ownership of the same motif and accused Marant of copying it from Antik Batik rather than from the Mixe community. A Paris court ruled in December 2015 that Antik Batik could establish no proprietary right in the design, since the pattern originated with, and belonged to, the community of Tlahuitoltepec rather than any commercial fashion house. The ruling vindicated the Mixe community’s account of authorship without awarding it any compensation or creating any registrable right it could invoke against future use, because no legal instrument existed, and none exists now, that would allow an indigenous community to hold intellectual property in a communal design as such. Marant withdrew the blouse from sale; Oaxaca’s state congress subsequently issued a cultural-heritage declaration citing the episode. The recurrence of the same fact pattern in Scandinavia, where the Sámi community continues to report unlicensed commercial use of the gákti despite an unsuccessful certification-mark initiative, suggests that the deficiency is not a defect peculiar to India’s GI Act but a structural limitation of an intellectual property order built around individual, identifiable authorship.
IV. Critical Evaluation
A. A Shared Weakness Across India’s Textile and Craft GIs
Kolhapuri is not an isolated case; it sits within a wider family of registered Indian GIs that share the identical vulnerability. Patan’s Patola, the double-ikat silk woven in Gujarat and prized for bearing an identical pattern on both faces of the cloth, received its GI tag in 2013 in the name of the Patan Double Ikat Patola Weavers Association. Because the registration protects the term ‘Patan Patola’ rather than the double-ikat technique or motif itself, power-loom imitations produced elsewhere escape the Act entirely so long as the label omits the words ‘Patan’ or ‘Patola.’ Kalamkari tells a parallel story: its devotional, hand-painted Srikalahasti style and its Persian-inflected, block-printed Machilipatnam style were registered as separate GIs in 2005 and 2008 respectively, each confined to specific districts of Andhra Pradesh. Nothing in either certificate stops a printed cotton dupatta manufactured elsewhere from being marketed generically as ‘kalamkari print’ the moment the seller omits any reference to Srikalahasti or Machilipatnam. Banarasi brocade completes the pattern: registered in 2009 across four classes covering silk brocade, sarees, dress material and embroidery, and confined to six districts around Varanasi, the GI has done little to arrest the sale of power-loom ‘Banarasi-style’ sarees woven far outside those districts, precisely because the Act polices the label rather than the look.
B. The Territorial Gap
Even where the name itself is used, the Act’s protection stops at India’s borders. Registration under the GI Act confers rights enforceable only within India; the statute contains no extraterritorial mechanism and no basis on which an Indian GI proprietor could restrain conduct occurring wholly abroad. Prada’s Milan showcase and manufacture in Italy illustrate the point directly: even had the sandals been marketed as ‘Kolhapuri,’ LIDCOM and LIDKAR would have had no statutory footing to act outside India, and would have depended entirely on whatever protection, if any, existed under Italian or European Union law. India’s experience with the Basmati patent dispute shows the same asymmetry in reverse. In 1997, the Texas-based company RiceTec obtained United States Patent No. 5,663,484 over rice lines and grains bred by crossing Basmati varieties long cultivated in India and Pakistan with an American long-grain rice India challenged the patent before the USPTO in 2000, and the resulting re-examination cancelled the majority of RiceTec’s claims and stripped the word ‘Basmati’ from the patent’s title, but only after several years of contested proceedings that a registered Indian GI, standing alone, would have done nothing to prevent. The lesson each dispute teaches is the same: protection secured under one jurisdiction’s regime does not travel, and a community’s only recourse abroad depends on the accident of whether the destination country happens to recognise a comparable right.
C. Toward a Sui Generis Framework
The recurring pattern across Kolhapuri, Patola, Kalamkari, Banarasi, the Mixe huipil and the Sámi gákti points to a single underlying deficiency: no existing instrument, domestic or international, treats a communally authored design as the kind of subject-matter capable of being owned. The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage defines intangible heritage broadly enough to include craft techniques of this kind, but creates obligations of safeguarding and inventory rather than any enforceable property right that a weaving cooperative or artisan corporation could assert against a fashion house. WIPO’s Intergovernmental Committee has circulated successive draft articles on Traditional Cultural Expressions built around registration, prior informed consent and benefit-sharing, but member states remain divided on the scope of the beneficiary community, the term of protection and the relationship of any new right to the public domain, and no text has been adopted. Absent such an instrument, reform is more likely to arrive piecemeal: an amendment to the Indian GI Act extending protection to characteristic forms and techniques and not merely names, a mandatory benefit-sharing levy modelled on the royalty provisions already used in some state handicraft schemes, and continued Indian advocacy at the TRIPS Council for parity between Article 23 and the handicraft and textile GIs that presently receive only Article 22’s weaker protection. None of these routes is available to LIDCOM or LIDKAR today, which is why the Bombay High Court’s procedural dismissal, however correct on its own terms, left the underlying grievance exactly where it found it.
V. Conclusion
The Prada-Kolhapuri controversy did not turn on a defect unique to one statute or one company. It exposed the structural boundary of a GI regime engineered to protect a name rather than a form, a boundary that Patola, Kalamkari and Banarasi share with Kolhapuri, and that the Mixe huipil and the Sámi gákti show is not confined to India. The Bombay High Court’s dismissal of the public interest litigation was doctrinally sound: standing under the GI Act rests with registered proprietors, and a dispute over deceptive similarity requires evidence a writ court cannot take under Article 226. But that correctness is itself the article’s central point. A legal system can decide every procedural question correctly and still leave the artisans of Kolhapur, Athani, Patan, Srikalahasti and Varanasi without a remedy for the reproduction of the very thing that makes their work recognisable.
Closing that gap requires more than enforcement of the existing Act. It requires either an amendment extending Indian GI protection to characteristic forms and techniques, continued diplomatic pressure to extend TRIPS Article 23-level protection beyond wines and spirits, or the long-delayed conclusion of a WIPO instrument on Traditional Cultural Expressions, ideally all three in combination, supported by a benefit-sharing mechanism ensuring that the communities whose techniques are reproduced share in the commercial value of that reproduction. Until one of these routes is taken, the law will continue to protect the word ‘Kolhapuri’ while remaining silent on the chappal itself, and the pattern that produced the Prada controversy will recur, in another season, under another brand, with the same procedural result and the same unaddressed loss.
References
Legislation
Copyright Act 1957 (India).
Designs Act 2000 (India).
Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act 1999 (India).
Patents Act 1970 (India).
Trade Marks Act 1999 (India).
United States Patent No 5,663,484, ‘Basmati Rice Lines and Grains’ (RiceTec Inc, 1997).
International Instruments
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), Annex 1C to the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization (adopted 15 April 1994) 1869 UNTS 299.
Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (adopted 17 October 2003, entered into force 20 April 2006) 2368 UNTS 3.
Cases
Ganesh S Hingmire v PRADA Group, 2025 SCC OnLine Bom 2681, PIL No 72 of 2025 (Bombay HC, 16 July 2025).
Government, Institutional and Registry Sources
District Varanasi, Government of Uttar Pradesh, ‘Banaras Brocades and Sarees’ (Certificate Date 4 September 2009).
Geographical Indications Registry, Intellectual Property India, Certificate of Registration: Kolhapuri Chappal, GI Application No 169, Certificate No 329 (11 December 2018).
Geographical Indications Registry, Intellectual Property India, GI Journal entries: Srikalahasti Kalamkari (2005) and Machilipatnam/Pedana Kalamkari (2008).
United States Patent and Trademark Office, Reexamination Certificate, Patent No 5,663,484 (29 January 2002).
World Intellectual Property Organization, Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, ‘Traditional Cultural Expressions’.
World Intellectual Property Organization, ‘Geographical Indications: What is a Geographical Indication?’.
World Trade Organization, ‘Intellectual Property (TRIPS) – Geographical Indications: Background and the Current Situation’.
News and Secondary Reports
Bar and Bench, ‘Bombay High Court Rejects PIL Alleging Luxury Brand Prada Copied Kolhapuri Chappals’ (Mumbai, 16 July 2025).
Business Standard, ‘HC Dismisses PIL against Prada for Unauthorised Use of Kolhapuri Chappal’ (Mumbai, 16 July 2025).
CADA Foundation, ‘Case Studies’.
Global Voices, ‘Viral Outrage over the Appropriation of Traditional Mexican Embroidery Is Full of Inaccuracies’ (15 December 2015).
Gujarat Samachar English, ‘Patan’s Perishing Art, Patola Sarees to Lose Existence Despite GI Tag?’ (18 December 2023).
HuffPost, ‘Mexico Prevents Indigenous Designs from Being Culturally Appropriated – Again’ (8 January 2016).
LawBeat, ‘Bombay HC Dismisses PIL Seeking Action against Prada for Alleged Misuse of Kolhapuri Chappal Design’ (Mumbai, 16 July 2025).
Mint, ‘Banaras Saris and Brocades Get GI Status’ (17 September 2009).
Drishti IAS, Daily News Analysis, ‘Patan Patola’.
Public Eye, ‘Basmati Rice “Biopiracy” Patent Struck Down by US Patent Office’ (2001).
The Fashion Law, ‘Isabel Marant Under Fire over Copyright of Traditional Mexican Design’ (November 2015).
The Indian Express (PTI), ‘“We Deeply Recognize…”: Kolhapuri Chappals “Inspiration” for Footwear in Fashion Show, Says Prada after Controversy’ (28 June 2025).
WWD, ‘Isabel Marant Cleared of Plagiar
ism Allegations’ (Paris, 7 December 2015).
